By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
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.
"But what about your constitutional rights?" Seegars says. "Everybody else in this country can buy guns except us. What makes you think the people who live in D.C. can't handle having guns? You think just because we have a gun, we would shoot people for no reason?"
Martin: "No."
"So why do you think we are so stupid, we would shoot people for no reason?"
Martin: "I just think people will take it too far."
Seegars: "They are taking it too far right now."
"Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety," the Federalist Noah Webster wrote. "A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain, in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state."
Some numbers regarding tyranny: According to the Metropolitan Police Department, in 2005, 79 percent of D.C. homicides were committed by firearm; 11 percent by knife; 6 percent, blunt object; 1 percent by hands, fists, feet; 2 percent used "other"; and 1 percent was "unknown."
There is always an "other" and an "unknown." The police report goes further: "The overwhelming majority of homicide victims continue to be African-American males; black females represent the second largest group."
And: "More than one-quarter of recovered firearms were 9mm pistols, while 18 percent were .38s or .357s." Most firearms recovered in the District were traced "overwhelmingly to the two surrounding states, Maryland, Virginia, accounting for 43 percent of the total successful traces." In 2004, 119 juveniles were arrested for carrying pistols without a license. In 2005, that figure went up to 165.
At the D.C. Council hearing last week on the confirmation of Cathy Lanier as police chief, a parade of regular people told the panel what was happening in their neighborhoods. "Citizens with proper training should be allowed to have handguns," Joyce Saucier said.
"I do not support gun control, because it's been a disaster," said the Rev. Douglas Moore, who says he is a black member of the NRA. "The liberals have the illusion that you can take away all the people's guns and everything would be all right. I believe in the Constitution. We never had any police brutality in Hickory, North Carolina, because everybody had guns. One day a police officer slapped my uncle, and my grandfather came out with a shotgun and said, 'I'll blow your goddamn head off.' And my grandfather was a Methodist preacher."
Moore, a former D.C. Council member, said he was the only original council member to vote against the gun ban. He has come out this day to praise the ruling that overturned it. "Everybody in my family has a gun. The police aren't responsible for your protection. You have to protect yourself."
Not far from where Moore stood, Kathy Henderson, former ANC commissioner in Carver Terrace, told the council: "The level of violence in Carver Terrace is horrific. Where are our reassurances? My community is filled with citizens who are tired of listening to the helicopters hovering every night."
Outside the hearing, Henderson said that repealing the gun ban "would be a public safety nightmare. A public bloodletting. All the gun violence in the District is attributed to guns coming from Maryland and Virginia. We've had a 30-year ban on guns in the District. If law-abiding citizens are allowed to join the fray, it will be a bloodletting because tensions are already high."
In Carver Terrace, she said, "gunshots were as common during dinner hour as dinner. There is gunfire and helicopters, unwelcome daily punctuation to our lives and an unwelcome daily intrusion. Criminals have more sophisticated weaponry than the police, AK-47s. What does that say about civil society when citizens are armed? I think that is tragic."
The framers' words: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Outside the D.C. Council hearing, there is no argument over the placement of the commas and whether these commas "divide the Amendment into two clauses: the first is prefatory, and the second is operative," as the appeals court wrote.
Tony Allen, 28, a meat wrapper in a grocery store, grew up on Raleigh Place SE: "I think they should be for protection against people that break in people's houses, snooping around. I think they should have guns."
Ask him whether he knows anybody with a gun, and suddenly he is silent. The silence is a loud punctuation mark in the debate here.
Traveling in the city, you stop in Trinidad, a changing Northeast neighborhood, and remember the shots fired when the crack epidemic was hot here, the brother's scream from a porch the night he heard his brother was fatally shot, the crowd gathered around under the yellow lights and the brother's body lying in the street.
Two men sitting under the cool shade on a porch of a blond-brick house remember that time, too.
"I think they should legalize it," says John Baldwin, 31, who lives in the neighborhood.
"These young thunder cats can get it, why shouldn't we?" says Mark Evans, 29, a rehabilitation therapist sitting on the white railing.
"Because a lot of people are not safe in your own homes," Baldwin says. "You should be able to protect yourself. I'm not saying anybody should have a gun. Just the responsible people."
"The responsible people," echoes Evans. "You should be able to bear arms. I wouldn't say it would be safer. But it would make criminals think twice. They might get what they are trying to put out."
"Could it get any worse?" Baldwin asks.
"It's going to get worse before it gets better," Evans says.
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