DC’s Norton pulls DC voting rights bill over Ensign pro-gun amendment
DC’s Rep. Norton has withdrawn a bill she’d proposed to give DC’s residents a voting representation in the House since we was unable to remove an amendment to the bill requiring that DC actually adhere to the Constitution and a Supreme Court ruling in respecting DC citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights:
Legislation that would give District residents a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was dealt a major setback Tuesday.
D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton pulled the bill after being unable to reach a compromise on a gun amendment attached to the legislation.
…
At issue is an amendment attached by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) that would have removed many of the District’s restrictions on gun ownership.
District leaders were split over the amendment. D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray had been opposed to passing the bill with the gun language. Others, including Mayor Adrian Fenty, were open to the possibility, seeing it as the only way to get the bill passed.
The Ensign Amendment would have revoked DC’s continued restrictions on common classes of handguns and dispensed with the purposely overcomplicated process DC resident must follow to license a firearm for their personal defense. That amendment was passed into the bill with a majority of the House voting to approve it, so you can understand Norton’s difficulty in having it removed. I’m interested in the reference she makes in the story to some sort of compromise they were considering to get the bill moving. Unfortunately, no one says what that compromise might be. Of course, she does take the time to assert that the existing amendment means that the bill “carries a danger to the public safety.”
The only danger to the public safety is in continuing to allow them to be targets for any criminal element that decided to drive on by.
In any case, the bill is now off the table which means it’s unlikely to reappear during this Congress. I guess she’ll try again later.
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And your argument is that the public will *not* be targets for any criminal element that decided to drive on by, if the amendment had been left in and the bill passed? The implication is that if the law abiding public could just have the currently restricted guns, then they could… what? Shoot at the criminal elements?
You’ll have to forgive me for not being support of this. I support the 2nd Amendment, but I have no confidence in the average, untrained person’s ability to properly make a firing decision. That’s not gun-handling, that’s not targeting — it’s the ability to decide if a shot should be taken at all.
Comment by Bob James | June 9, 2009
Ooookay, you support the 2nd Amendment but you’re not in support of allowing the residents of DC to own handguns in common use throughout the rest of the country? And you don’t support permitting those firearms they’re allowed to use to be kept in functioning condition in their homes? Could you please reconcile those positions? They appear to be mutually exclusive. If not for defense of your home and family, what is the point of supporting the 2nd Amendment?
Comment by ricjames | June 9, 2009