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http://www.philly.com/inquirer/heal...09_What_a_handgun_ban_didnt_do_for_D_C_.html#
Except for the race-baiting
, I thought this was a good article on the objective facts of the issue. I "look like him" and my mom "looks like his mom."
What a handgun ban didn't do for D.C.
Is there a "smoking gun" that proves the efficacy of gun laws? Or are such claims based on illusion?
By Steve Goldstein
Inquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Shortly before 3 a.m. last Monday, 41-year-old Vincent White of Temple Hills, Md., was shot multiple times and killed on a street in the southeast section of Washington. It was the District of Columbia's 40th homicide of the year.
Three weeks earlier, a federal appeals court ruled the district's 30-year ban on keeping handguns in homes was unconstitutional because it violates the Second Amendment.
There was no cause and effect. The handgun ban remains law pending appeal, which could take up to a year.
But every new shooting in the nation's capital reminds gun-control advocates what's at stake.
"We've had this law on the books for a long time," said Linda Singer, the district's acting attorney general, who is handling the appeal. "I believe if that law wasn't here, there would have been more guns and more gun violence."
Law enforcement officials as well as sociologists ponder the search for a cure for the disease of gun violence that infects many urban communities in America. Is there a "smoking gun" that proves the efficacy of the D.C. handgun ban? Or is such a law so bound up in the myriad other factors that contribute to gun violence that it is impossible to say?
They are literally praying for an answer in Philadelphia, which has just logged its 108th homicide of 2007.
At the Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in West Oak Lane earlier this month, nationally known Bishop T.D. Jakes exclaimed: "This mounting death toll and murder march has got to stop. Enough is enough."
Two days earlier, Mayor Street convened a meeting of regional mayors on violence. One of the participants was Daniel Webster, an authority on gun trafficking at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Asked to compare D.C. and Philadelphia, which has no handgun law, Webster said in an interview that city-based laws may not be very effective unless they are backed by statewide or federal legislation.
"Such legislation minimizes the trafficking problem, which D.C. faces, being surrounded by Maryland and Virginia," Webster said. "It's especially easy to buy guns in Virginia."
According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, about 97 percent of guns used in D.C. crimes originate outside Washington.
In 2006, the Metropolitan Police Department recovered 2,655 firearms in D.C., a 13 percent increase over 2005.
"Are there guns in the home that we're not getting? Yes," Singer acknowledged.
The federal appeals court decision overturning the D.C. gun ban was the first to hold a gun-control law unconstitutional on the ground that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals, as opposed to the collective rights of state militias. The case was brought by a guard at the Federal Judicial Center who was permitted to carry a gun on duty but denied permission to keep one at home.
Testifying before the D.C. City Council shortly after the court decision, Police Chief Cathy Lanier said that homicides in the city were frequently motivated by arguments and retaliation and that, coupled with domestic violence, "these motives account for almost half of all homicides."
"More guns in the home could lead to more criminal shootings in domestic incidents and arguments, as well as accidental shootings and suicides," Lanier said. "I feel that these types of incidents would far outnumber instances in which a handgun in the home might be used as protection."
Singer said it was "hard to answer scientifically" how many guns would have come into D.C. without the handgun ban, or how many more juvenile shootings, domestic shootings, other impulse shootings, and suicides might otherwise have occurred.
"Having a weapon in the home really changes the equation of what happens," she said. "We worry about guns being taken from homes. We know that guns tend to be used repeatedly, so every gun removed has an exponential effect on crime reduction."
An attempt was made, nonetheless, to analyze the effectiveness of the ban.
The D.C. law banning the purchase, sale, transfer or possession of handguns by civilians was enacted in 1976. In 1991, a group of researchers from the University of Maryland published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that examined the effect of the law on the frequency of homicides and suicides by looking at the period 1968 through 1987.
The study concluded there was a "prompt decline" in homicides and suicides by firearms in D.C. not replicated in adjacent Maryland and Virginia jurisdictions without a handgun law. The data suggested that, after the law was enacted, an average of 47 deaths per year were prevented in D.C.
Criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University insisted the study was flawed.
Kleck noted in an interview the handgun law did not apply to those who already held a gun permit in D.C. before 1976. Such permits could not be transferred, thus the elimination of guns was gradual, not abrupt, so instant results are suspect.
By extending the study two more years to 1989, Kleck concluded the reduction in homicides became statistically insignificant. Moreover, the original study used as a control group the relatively affluent suburbs of D.C., instead of a demographically similar jurisdiction such as Baltimore.
"Washington doesn't look any better compared to Baltimore," Kleck said. "If you correct for these flaws . . . you don't find any effect from the law."
Miami Police Chief John Timoney, whose reign as top cop in Philadelphia brought a reduction in homicides to below 400 for the first time in a decade, said that if the decision overturning the handgun ban is affirmed, there is likely to be a rise in the number of suicides and accidental shootings.
"And it won't necessarily be reflected in the homicide rate, because suicides and not-fatal shootings won't show up in those statistics," Timoney said. "You'll have an increase in those shootings . . . and opponents [of the ban] will say that the homicide rate didn't rise."
But Jack Riley, a policing and public safety analyst for the Rand Corp. think tank, said overturning the D.C. law would not have an impact on what he called the most frequent kind of crime and frequent kind of handgun violence in the district - "individuals who are deeply embedded in their criminal careers and who already have access to the black market in firearms."
Riley conceded, however, that if the court ruling is upheld, there will be a psychological effect.
"Having a 30-year-old law overturned does unmoor people," he said. "Because of how long the law has been in effect, it makes people pause and feel like a valuable tool is taken away, even though an objective evaluation of the impact of that tool shows that there is no strong evidence either way on its effectiveness."
Other cities and states are keenly interested in the legal outcome on the D.C. appeal, wondering how future gun-control laws might be affected.
Hopkins' Webster believed the court decision would be overturned, but said that even if it is not, "the only kinds of laws that will be in jeopardy are those that are not targeted toward keeping guns away from dangerous individuals." (K-Rom: Is this the first attempt at damage control?
Yet the shock of losing such a long-standing ban and the struggle to find a cure for the urban epidemic are likely to motivate strong public response. When many victims are African American or poor or both, Sunday sermons may not be enough.
At a rally 10 days ago outside Washington City Hall organized by a group called Peaceaholics, and joined by Mayor Adrian Fenty, a teenager named Anthony Graves let emotion rule over mere statistics.
"If people are allowed to buy guns and have them in their houses in D.C.," Graves said, "there will be more killings and more deaths of people that look like me, and there will be more mothers crying who look like mine."
Contact staff writer Steve Goldstein at 202-408-2758 or [email protected].
Except for the race-baiting
, I thought this was a good article on the objective facts of the issue. I "look like him" and my mom "looks like his mom."
