Odd Man Out

I've been reading about the rising levels of violence and crime in Washington D.C., which has never been a happy place. Well apparently it's even worse than awful. It's gotten so bad that the police chief is planning to block off the worst neighborhoods and permit entry based on ID.

And this is the "lite" form of what she, the police chief, had in mind. The stronger plan was warrantless, house-to-house searches for guns and drugs. Of course, I'm deeply troubled by the thought of grim officers saying "Papers please" to DC residents trying to go home, but I'm also deeply troubled by the Hobbesian state of nature that appears to have broken out in our country's capitol. Perhaps Donald, as a resident, has some thoughts...

On another note, I feel somewhat vindicated in my view that gun control needs to be federalized. DC has the most restrictive gun control laws in the country and they haven't dented gun violence one iota. Why is that? Nearby states (*cough*Georgia*cough*Virginia*cough) with loose gun control make it possible for unscrupulous sorts to buy up tons of cheap handguns and sell them for 2-4x their retail value in DC. Because those neighbor states exercise no oversight, yon scumbags (I'm in a Dirty Harry frame of mind) will never have to account for the guns they purchased and resold. All that DC's gun restrictions do is make things inconvenient for citizens attempting to purchase guns legally.

DC's police are in a tough spot. Lacking any federal action on the gun matter, all they can do is hunker down. My personal feeling is that DC should decriminalize, as much as possible, the drugs but make illegal gun possession a class A felony. Find a guy carrying a handgun illegally, his sentence should be on the order of 20 years. Generous reductions should then be offered if our criminal buddy will rat out the seller and anyone else he knows. Then, guns should be treated like drugs in the sense that possession above a certain number should be treated as "possession with intent to distribute." If a guy is caught with a pound of marijuana, it's assumed, legally, that he means to sell some. Similarly, if a guy is caught with three guns, say, it should be assumed he means to sell some. The sentence should be that much worse then. Every effort should be made to locate the sources of illegal guns. If, as I suspect, they turn out to be located in Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina, then DC should have grounds to file suit against those states in federal court. (I'm not a lawyer, but I'd think the case would be far, far clearer than the case for suing the manufacturers, which was tried and lost; basically the argument is "your lax oversight has resulted in homicides here, so you're implicated in manslaughter and you owe us money for dealing with the consequences of your poor oversight.")

If the sales channels can be shut down, we should see an improvement in the reasonably near term. This isn't effective for drugs because their points of origin and manufacture, so to speak, are unknown and/or out of reach. But guns are absolutely traceable. Every gun can be traced from manufacturer or importer, to distributor to dealer with great precision. DC doesn't even need a lot of cooperation from other states, they only need help from the gun manufacturers and distributors--and some local regulations to support this little plan.

Another smart thing to do would be to enlist the NRA. The NRA has always said something like "crack down on illegal sales and transport but leave law-abiding citizens alone." Take them at their word. Offer to ease gun control for lawful folks and get them to enlist their considerable lobbying power on your behalf. They won't support federalization, but they ought to support developing new ways to choke off illegal sales. It's part of their platform! The NRA lobbying for supportive laws in GA, VA and SC could be very helpful.

So I now hold, in Washington State, a concealed weapons permit. I can carry a loaded pistol, as long as its concealed, pretty much anywhere except Federal buildings, schools, bars and outdoor music festivals. (This last will be understood by anyone who's ever been to the Gorge Amphitheater, and yes, it is specifically called out in the state code.) As it happens, I have no desire to carry a pistol. I've lived in Seattle a while now and I've never felt sufficiently threatened to want a pistol. In fact, the only time I've ever thought to myself, "I wish I had a gun" is when I've been well outside the city. We have both cougars and meth labs here, both found in abundance outside the city. No, I actually applied for the permit because getting one requires a full background check. One must be fingerprinted and backgrounded by the FBI. Because the check is more thorough than the standard I'd-like-to-buy-a-handgun check, one can generally assume that a CPL holder with ID is safe bet (that's Concealed Pistol License). Many of the sellers in the Washington State Arms Collectors will no longer sell to people they don't know and who don't have a CPL. It's about liability. No one is afraid of criminal liability, but a civil wrongful-death suit could, hypothetically, be made to stick, even though secondary sales are not regulated here. Some ranges will not accept people without background checks. Also, I'm now exempt from the usual waiting period. Usually, buying a handgun in WA means a 10-14 day wait. CPL holders are exempt from it. So in the end, I got the CPL partly as a convenience and partly so that I can easily convince people, "hey, I'm alright here." (Obviously, I mean gun-owning people. I'm aware it has the opposite effect on others.)

I own and enjoy guns. I do, however, think gun control is a great idea. I loathe the NRA. Now most of the gun control laws out there are half-assed at best, but the principle is sound. And my odd, residual liberal guilt about acquiring a CPL forces me to jot down some thoughts about that principle.

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Foreign Affairs (Sep/Oct 2007) has a pair of essays on foreign policy by Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards. Since I have an instinctive hatred of Giuliani, I thought I ought to take a look (I'll look at Edwards' essay later).

(Side note: I'm going to assume, for convenience, that the candidates actually wrote the essays, and didn't simply sign whatever their smartest staffers slapped together.)

Rudy starts by establishing his bona fides, framing the debate. We're all part of the 9/11 generation. And he was right there in it. We can't criticize Rudy without implicitly impugning all those innocents who died at "Ground Zero." He's heavy-handed. He goes on to say:

America is a nation that loves peace and hates war. At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state [no capitalization in Rudy's text].

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Apparently, the authors of a study recently published in Nature Neuroscience won't draw that conclusion. However, their results do suggest that self-proclaimed "liberals" do process new or surprising information better than self-proclaimed conservatives.

I absolutely love this sort of research, though I imagine the conservative take on the same information would be "Liberals Easily Distracted by Shiny Things and other Ephemera."

LA Times has the story