Crime Data Underscore Limits Of D.C. Gun Ban's Effectiveness

D.C. gun owners lined up at police headquarters to re-register their firearms in 1976. Supporters of strict gun laws hoped that others would follow D.C. officials' example. (The Washington Post)

"One of the difficult things is, you can't measure what didn't happen," Singer said. "You can't measure how many guns didn't come into the District because we have this law. You can't measure all the crimes that we know were prevented from happening."

But you can measure the violence that did occur, using the bellwether offense of homicide to chart the ebb and flow of crime in the District since the ban was enacted. And the violence here over those years was worse than in most other big cities, many of them in states with far less restrictive gun laws.

When they imposed the ban in 1976, then-Mayor Walter E. Washington (D) and the council were reacting to public concern about crime, which began rising across the country in the mid-1960s.

Reflecting a nationwide spike, the District recorded about 12,000 robberies in 1969, a twelvefold increase from 1960. The city's 1969 homicide rate (287 slayings, or about 36 per 100,000 residents) was nearly triple the rate at the start of the decade.

Congress reacted to the assassinations of the 1960s and the overall crime increase by passing the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, barring firearms ownership for a broad class of people, including convicted felons. A year later, the federally appointed D.C. Council required local gun owners to register their firearms. By 1974, police said at the time, about 50,000 guns were registered in the city.

Although crime in the District and nationwide slowly tapered off in the 1970s, the public perception remained that "D.C." stood for "Dodge City," as one headline put it. Calling gun registration "a farce," then-Police Chief Jerry V. Wilson said officers were seizing about 300 illegal firearms a month, many from Maryland and Virginia.

"We don't want to panic people," said a D.C. police captain at the time, "but they should beware that if they get into an altercation with a stranger, there's a distinct possibility he may be carrying a gun."

In this climate, D.C. voters elected a mayor and 13 council members in 1974 under newly granted home rule. Unlike those in Congress who had been overseeing the city government, these new leaders were highly attuned to D.C. residents, having come mostly from the ranks of local civil rights and social welfare activists.

"We were uniquely in touch with the folks," Winters recalled.

And it was clear that the folks wanted gun control. A Georgetown University poll in 1975, for example, found that three out of four D.C. residents favored a handgun ban. "People were afraid," Winters said. "We knew we had to stand up and do something."

Still, few if any council members thought that the statute would significantly stem the flow of guns into the city, officials recalled. Their main hope was that the ban would start a trend, eventually leading to a federal handgun ban.

"The bill should not be looked at as a panacea to solve all gun-related crime problems that we have in the city," warned then-council member John A. Wilson (D), after the council passed the measure, 12 to 1, and the mayor signed it into law in July 1976. "But maybe it will save some senseless accident at somebody's home," Wilson said.