But First He’s Going to Smoke Some Crack!

The Examiner editorializes on a surprising development in Washington, DC:

District residents have been the guinea pigs in a failed 30-year-old experiment in social engineering. Three decades of strict gun control laws have not made the capital city’s streets safer.

[…]

None other than former Mayor Marion Barry, now representing Ward 8 on the D.C. Council, is waving the white flag of surrender by introducing legislation to provide potential victims a limited window of opportunity to arm themselves in self defense.

[…]

Barry’s bill is a first step and it is co-sponsored by Council members Jim Graham, D-Ward 1, Kwame Brown, D-at large, and Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6 — none of whom are gun-toting NRAers. However, all four councilmen face the same intractable problem in their own neighborhoods: The city’s gun control laws don’t work as advocates promised they would. Armed criminals still terrorize peaceful residents who remain essentially defenseless, particularly those in the poorest neighborhoods.

Interesting bedfellows indeed. From the rest of the piece, I get the impression that the bill would allow a legally owned gun to be kept in the home fully assembled and loaded; in other words ready to use against an intruder. Washington has been a leading light of the gun control movement for decades, and even though this is a tiny change in the letter of the law, it strikes me as a 180 in the spirit of it. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, that’s one small step for a city, one giant leap for individual rights.