Police Sgt. Michael Skelly, easing his squad car down Trinidad Avenue on a sundown patrol of the neighborhood last Friday, keeps an eye on the young men who congregate on corners. Local and federal drug agents have focused on the area for years, putting a dent in open-air dealing, and Skelly is driving past row houses and small apartments, tree-lined streets with corner shops where the shop owners work behind bulletproof glass.
"When you hear 'shots fired' on the [dispatch] radio in this neighborhood, you can be pretty sure you're going to find somebody who's been shot," Skelly says, steering the car the wrong way down a one-way street to try to throw off drug dealers' lookouts. "They don't play around, shooting up in the air, over here."
Wilhelmina Lawson, an activist in the Trinidad neighborhood, says "a gun would make me feel safer. It's what they were invented for."
(Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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Cocaine dealing on Trinidad Avenue was so busy in the early 1990s that there were traffic jams. Guys just did deals on the corner, in broad daylight, and cars backed up.
Thelma Jackson, a retired U.S. Bureau of Engraving employee, has lived on the street for the past 52 years and watched it all go down.
Jackson liked the neighborhood when she moved in half a century ago. The place had a close, community feel. It was a part of town where you called your neighbors by their first name and you left the front door unlocked. That changed as she and the city aged; now, she often feels uncomfortable -- that faint tingle of fear -- just walking to the bus stop.
She's had her brush with crime. Someone climbed onto her roof several years ago, busted in a trap door, came in and stole cash, televisions, the works. She wasn't home. After getting over the shakes, she put burglar bars over almost every portal in the house.
"I live behind iron bars now," she says.
"I get nervous just reading the morning paper sometimes," she continues. "But a gun -- am I supposed to shoot somebody with it? I'd be so scared with that thing in my hand I'd probably wind up shooting myself."
Two miles and half a world away, U.S. Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) has gathered 227 other co-sponsors on his gun bill, which is headed for a vote today. In announcing the bill a couple of weeks ago, he pointed out that the city's murder rate climbed 200 percent from the onset of the handgun ban in 1976 to 1991 -- brutal evidence, he said, that the handgun ban "isn't working."
He did not return seven phone calls in the past week from The Post, but was quoted in the Indianapolis Star yesterday as saying that the issue for the people of the District came down to survival: "Do you believe law-abiding citizens have the right to protect themselves, or do you believe only criminals do?" he said.
That point is hotly debated, but it is clear that Souder hasn't exactly been forthcoming.
By picking 1991 as a comparison, he was using the city's all-time homicide record, plucked from the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, when the entire nation, not just the District, was convulsed by deadly violence. There were 482 murders in the city that year, compared with 188 in 1976 -- which, as it happens, had been the lowest number since the late 1960s.
Left unmentioned is the fact that the city's murder rate has dropped nearly 50 percent since 1991, down to 248 last year and down a further 20 percent this year.
Here's another fact: D.C.'s ban deals only with handguns. More than 101,000 residents have legally registered rifles and shotguns over the decades, according to police, and residents can protect themselves with, say, a buckshot-blasting 12-gauge shotgun, a can't-miss weapon big enough to blow half the living room into the front yard.
Though Lawson wouldn't mind a handgun, she says her neighborhood has stabilized, and is even making progress, because of more civic activism -- she's the area's ANC commissioner -- better city services and increased police surveillance.
"The long-term solution is education, and giving our children a chance. I don't know how people can miss that," she says. "These young kids, these young men out here, they don't grow up wanting to hurt people. The problem is, as a society we don't give them anything to do but get in trouble and have babies. I feel sorry for them, I do. They have so much more materially than we did when I was growing up, but their lives are so . . ."
The thought trails off, unfinished.
"I don't know that a gun solves any of that."
