Getting Fingers Off Triggers

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In announcing his intention this week to seek a Supreme Court ruling upholding the District's strict gun laws, Mayor Adrian Fenty said, "The handgun ban has saved many lives and will continue to do so if it remains in effect." Can't argue with that. Gun control advocates tell us that a gun kept in the home is more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting or in an attempted or completed suicide than in self-defense. What's more, the combination of guns and domestic violence is lethal. So, yes, the ban has probably saved lives.

But has the 30-year-old gun ban made our streets any safer? Since the handgun ban has been on the books, the criminally minded have been using guns with a frequency that rivals breathing.

From 1987 through Wednesday, there have been more than 6,400 homicides in the District of Columbia, most committed with firearms. That figure doesn't include non-fatal shootings.

This year, the 7th Police District in Southeast Washington alone had noted 181 shootings up to Wednesday, according to Post reporter Allison Klein. And robberies by gun-wielding thugs? The Post's weekly Crime Report noted 44 gun-related robberies between July 6 and 12.

We have one of the country's toughest handgun laws. I fear we may also have more weapons than the Iraqi army.

In the past five years, the D.C. police have taken more than 12,000 firearms off our streets. Guess what? Only 161 were acquired through gun buy-back operations.

Which gets us to the heart of our problem: the bitter fruit we're reaping from the catastrophic breakdown of family and community. Behind the guns are young men so desensitized by their upbringing and their surroundings that the welfare of others counts for nothing and remorse is a word without meaning.

The use of a gun to rob, to mete out pain and to exact revenge comes to them as easily as the ability to tie a shoelace.

These are angry, poorly schooled youths, abandoned by fathers, neglected and abused by ill-prepared mothers, raised on mean streets, who have drifted into lives of crime without even a tug at the coattail.

Now they have guns and no feeling for other people's feelings.

That coldness, that disregard for another person's life, is what lurks behind: