Guns in D.C. are still foolishly dangerous after Heller

by Naureen Mohammad, 2L
Law Weekly
March 24, 2009

On my way to Ani DiFranco’s concert on Saturday, Mar. 7, I found a gun under the stairs at the Columbia Heights metro, which is somewhat ironic because my favorite Ani song is "To the Teeth," a musical rant against the media and politicians who glorify and defend guns. The gun was just lying on the ground where anyone, even a child, could have picked it up and used it. Leaving a gun in a public place within the reach of a toddler is not only illegal but also morally reprehensible.

Of course, the gun’s presence also raised questions. Had it been dumped because it was recently used in the commission of a crime somewhere in my neighborhood? Had someone brought it onto the platform on his or her way to commit a crime elsewhere? Or had it been placed there for someone to pick up and use on the platform that I visit at least twice every single day?

Gun control is a somewhat controversial topic in the District right now. Last year, we had Heller overturning the D.C. gun ban, and recently the long-awaited Senate bill giving us representation to go along with taxation only passed when the Democrats agreed to redistrict, giving the Republicans one more seat, most likely in Utah, and striking down more D.C. gun laws.

Once again, the lives of those of us who live in the nation’s capital are held hostage by the wishes of a party that has seen fit to restrict our rights and ignore our needs for decades.

The justification for lifting our strongest gun laws always comes back to the Second Amendment. I have a lot of respect for our Constitution, and especially for the Bill of Rights, but I do not understand why so many people see the right to bear arms as being set in stone. The Supreme Court in United States v. Miller allowed some gun laws under the theory that the right to bear arms is dependent upon the first clause of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of a well-regulated militia, which is no longer as relevant as it was in the 18th century. States do not depend on civilians taking up guns and protecting them from the federal government or even from an outside enemy the way they did during the Revolutionary War.

But even if one does not accept that argument, one has to admit that the Constitution has been changed before and can be changed again. We have come to accept that the Framers were wrong about their views on slavery and women’s suffrage, so why is it so difficult to accept that they had not imagined the impact that guns would have on American society two hundred years after they died?

No one can deny that impact is horrendous, particularly on our most vulnerable populations. In 2005, almost 2000 children and teenagers were murdered with guns, over 800 used them to commit suicide, and 173 were unintended victims of shootings. For every one child murdered with a gun, about six times as many children are non-fatally wounded by firearms.

Gun violence disproportionally harms people of color and women. More than half of the teens who die as a result of gunshot injuries are African American, the rest are evenly split between Caucasians, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.

On average, we lose about 21 African Americans to gun violence every day, and the leading cause of death for African Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 is homicide, which is committed with guns over 90 percent of the time.

African American women are five times more likely to be murdered by guns than young white women. Moreover, between 1990 and 2005 over two-thirds of the spouse and ex-spouse murders, which feature female victims the majority of the time, were committed with guns.

With such statistics, it is difficult to find any redeeming quality of guns that is worth the violence that they help cause, not even the great old American tradition of hunting. However, since this is one of the sticking points preventing effective gun control, we will have to think of creative options that will allow us to protect our children and still permit people to use guns for sport.

Perhaps we should create a system like fishing licenses, where people not only need permits to get guns, but also for each individual occasion to use them. In order to prevent gun violence or suicides at home, and to accommodate Justice Scalia’s version of American tradition in Heller (dialing the police with one hand and holding a rifle with another), we can restrict gun ownership and not allow people to keep handguns or semi-automatic weapons, neither of which are needed to shoot deer.

The opposition might say that D.C.’s gun ban did not actually end gun violence in the city, but it did help reduce it. Crime in D.C. has gone down in the last ten years, and much of what exists is because of guns being imported from our less restrictive neighbors to the south.

For gun control laws to truly work in this country, they will have to be consistent across the country, which will be a logistical and political nightmare. Nevertheless, it must happen.

As a country that is rich in resources and human capital, we lose more children to gun-related violence than in 25 other industrialized nations combined. Twenty years ago, the World Health Organization convened and began to fight polio in a worldwide effort that came up against poverty and lack of resources in the developing world, but together, we have nearly succeeded in eradicating the disease.

In the war against gun violence, we have a smaller area of land to work with and ten times the devastation that polio caused in the earlier half of the twentieth century. We have to come together again so that our children don’t stumble across guns casually dumped at metro stations or become victims of drive-by or school shootings.