Thursday, July 17

If it's okay for school teachers... - So the senior Senator from Utah (why does this kind of thing always come from Utah?) wants to repeal DC's handgun prohibition and create concealed-weapon permits for residents.

While I am sure this will make many a Capitol Hill liberal quake in anger, color me unimpressed. I have never owned a gun -- never had one in the family household growing up, either. Yet I can attest to the weirdly unsettling feeling of living in a city where I know I can't own a gun legally, even though criminals have them and seem pretty comfortable using them too. I actually considered this before I moved to the District, since afterwards the simple act of trying to buy a gun would have been either impossible or entailed lying about my residence on an application.

As a staunch moderate, I believe in reasonable gun control, not abolition. This doesn't align me with that gun-worship cult over at the NRA, but neither do I think that outright bans are the panacea Big Government-types want you to believe. Speaking as someone who lives under a regime where, as the proverb goes, only outlaws have guns, the current system doesn't make me feel safe, and I don't fear Sen. Hatch's plan.