DC adjusts its gun laws again after realizing they won’t survive lawsuits
Once again the DC government has released “emergency regulations” designed to get their handgun laws to actually comply with the Supreme Court decision on Heller v. DC from back in January of 2008. With lawsuits pending from their continued attempt to throttle DC residents’ exercise of their 2nd Amendment rights, DC has expanded the list of allowable handguns:
In addition to permitting guns in the District that are legal in California, the city will also allow residents to apply to register handguns that are permissible in Massachusetts and Maryland.
The new rules will give gun owners a broader array of choices when they go shopping for handguns to keep in their home. In some cases, the change could mean something as minor as what color of weapon they can purchase. In other instances, gun owners will have access to weapons with additional design features.
I have a similar problem to this approach as the first one, which tied the allowable gun list to the California legislature. The citizens of DC have absolutely no control over the agencies that make those lists and no standing to either protest or challenge them. DC’s council is, once again, abdicating their responsibility to their citizens. I haven’t examined the lists from Maryland or Massachusetts but I have to ask whether those lists suffer the same flaw as California’s. That is, do the gun manufacturers have to pay an annual fee to get listed? If they do, then the lists have little to do with public safety and everything to do with revenue collection. I disapprove of basing a “public safety” requirement off a list that’s a “pay-to-play” approach.
Consider, too, that a gun owner’s registration must be renewed on a regular basis. What happens to the owner who has a firearm currently on the list from, say, Massachusetts when he tries to renew only to find out that the Massachusetts regulations have dropped that particular firearm? Reading this new set of regulations, I’d say the gun owner would be told he can’t register the firearm. Which, of course, means he can’t own it inside DC’s city limits. So because some set of state representatives or bureaucrats hundreds or thousands of miles away made a decision (or the gun manufacturer decided not to pay the requested bribe to get on the “safe” list) this gun owner may find his firearm suddenly illegal even though it was perfectly legal at the time he registered it. I would hope there’s a grandfathering effect in place but, given DC’s track record on common-sense gun legislation, I doubt there is.
We’ll see if the rules changes satisfy those bringing the lawsuits and hear what they have to say in the coming weeks, I’m sure. We should hear them out. I’ll write more on this should they have something to say.
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