Bullet Points: The People Debate Fate Of Gun Ban

Gun proponent Sandra Seegars lives in Ward 8, a hot spot for gun violence. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

When the night spits bloody fire and gunshots bang outside your door, when metal bars can't keep a thug out, when the crack pebble rules, when the boys on the corner think "going hard" is spraying bullets at the back of someone's head: How are the "good people" supposed to protect themselves?

When there is talk that police take too long to come or may not come at all and that real justice belongs to the street, and retaliation is the No. 1 motive of homicides in the city, and somebody's knocking at your door round midnight, is that the time to engage in a debate about the commas placed in the Second Amendment?

When you grow up knowing people who have been killed by guns, "a lot of people," would you believe the Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, was written to give a state's militia a shield from "federal encroachment"?

In the District, not that far from the Capitol, real people who live on the real fault lines of the gun battles debate the right to bear arms and it goes something like this:

"It's good one way, and it can hurt you another way," says Leonard Martin, 66, a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Metrobus driver. "The way I see it is, if you get guns, the crooks are going to break in the house and steal your arms. Second, if somebody is picking at you and they chase you in the house and you think that's them at the door, it could be someone else, but you fire through the door and kill an innocent person. I just think the law should stay where it is."

"But I want a gun," says Sandra Seegars, an activist in Ward 8, which records some of the city's highest rates of homicides and gun-related violence.

"Then move to Maryland," says Martin.

"I don't want to move to Maryland," Seegars shoots back. "I want to stay in D.C. And I want a gun."

"I want a gun, too, but I can't handle one," Martin says. "And you got some regular citizens out here as crazy as people across the street." He is pointing toward St. Elizabeths Hospital.

The setting is Player's Lounge, the legendary joint that sits on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, named after the man who advocated nonviolence. But the lounge is not that far from Malcolm X Boulevard, named after the man who demanded a revolution by any means necessary. So it seems the crossroads to seek an answer to the question: What does the Second Amendment mean in D.C., where residents don't have a vote on Capitol Hill? And until last week couldn't have handguns in their homes unless the guns were registered before 1976, when the law banning guns was passed? Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned the handgun ban, basing its decision in its finding that the right to bear arms goes beyond militias to individuals.

Martin is sitting at the bar. And Seegars just finished a plate of pigs' feet. And the debate continues.

"The law should stay like it is," Martin is saying.