Okay, so Washington D.C. lawmakers stopped kicking and screaming yesterday long enough to pass a concealed carry law. I was amused by the gunbloggers who reported themselves shocked! Shocked! that it was ‘may-issue.’ Seriously, the big news is that a federal court forced (what is for all practical purposes) a municipal government to pass a law permitting gun carry at all. Did anyone expect the law to be permissive?
No, the only question left to be answered was how unnecessarily burdensome they’d make it. What, they spent years fighting this. You thought they weren’t going to be petulant when they lost?
Well, it seems petulance is just what was on display, at least from one council member.
Councilmember David Grosso (I-At Large) introduced an amendment today to establish a public database of concealed carry permit holders, saying people have a right to know if their neighbor or date has a gun.
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Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large) supported the amendment, saying that, while there’s a right to bear arms, there’s “no commensurate right to privacy.” Yvette Alexander (D-At Large) was also in favor of the amendment: “Who cares about the confidentiality of a gun owner? We don’t want it, so expose yourself.”
They never did actually vote not to do the database thing, they just tabled it until the reporters went away.
As for the law itself, ‘permissive’ is not an applicable word. You can go to the article and read the details for yourself, but clearly by ‘may-issue’ they mean ‘we may issue one of these, about forty days after we’re all simultaneously struck by lightning several times.’
Yeah, I read about that and just shook my head. The “may issue” is the tip of the iceberg, of course. The restricted places pretty much limits actual carrying to nowhere. Ain’t going to happen unless you are one of the already favored “only ones.” Carrying simply isn’t going to be “allowed” any place an ordinary person would actually need to be armed for self defense. And I’m sure you’d wind up in some deep, dark dungeon if you were caught with your gat just about anywhere, permit or no.
This is definitely a case of the ruling idiots there “still standing up inside.” They didn’t really give an inch, thought they will bitch endlessly about even the appearance of doing so.
Make it the “Other Way” A database of those citizens who *don’t* carry a ccw.
So there’s no right to privacy for people who want to exercise their explicitly, Constitutionally guaranteed rights, but there *is* a sacrosanct right to privacy when a woman (but never a man!) wants to kill her own child.
Perhaps we should just start referring to all politicians as “The Honorable Humpty Dumpty”.