By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
In a city with one of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, perhaps no one understands the controversial statute in more detail than D.C. police Lt. Jon Shelton. As the officer in charge of firearms registration, he is the answer man.
Ask what makes a rifle legal or illegal, and he'll talk about muzzle lengths, ammunition capacity and the difference between bolt action and semiautomatic. What types of handguns are security guards permitted to carry? Shelton can cite a half-dozen local and federal laws and regulations, quoting them from memory, and explain why some guards are allowed more firepower than others, depending on whom they work for.
So, simple question:
As the city prepares to defend its 1976 gun law before the U.S. Supreme Court next month, seeking to overturn a lower court ruling that declared the tough restrictions unconstitutional, how many people in the District legally own handguns, rifles or shotguns?
Shelton paused. He grinned. He shook his head.
"That we don't know."
Because the city's "handgun ban" does not ban handguns entirely, and because the statute outlaws only certain kinds of rifles and shotguns, a huge number of D.C. residents legally possess firearms.
As of this month, 66,019 guns of various types were registered with Shelton's office. But because the city does not require registrations to be renewed, it's possible that a lot of those weapons, registered years ago, are no longer here.
"The best we can say is, even with the law in effect, there are thousands and thousands of legal firearms in the District of Columbia," Shelton said.
Opponents of the gun law, who have asked the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling against the statute, argue that the restrictions not only are unconstitutional, but have created a tangled regulatory system that has not made the city safer.
Shelton, who has been overseeing firearms records for 14 years, said he has no idea why D.C. Council members did not require periodic re-registration of guns when they passed the restrictions three decades ago. If they had done so, the police department might have a better idea of how many legal guns are in the District.
"The only way to find that out," Shelton said, "would be for us to take all these registrations and go out and knock on every door and see who's still here."
In a third-floor room at D.C. police headquarters on Indiana Avenue NW, where three officers working for Shelton keep track of legal guns in the city, five wide filing cabinets are filled with registration forms, some decades old. Owners of registered firearms are required to inform Shelton's office if they move out of the city or if their guns are lost, stolen or disposed of. But not everyone complies with the rule.
"Don't get me wrong, we do get many people who do the right thing," Shelton said. "But this is a very transient population here in Washington, and I can vouch for the fact that a lot of people don't do the right thing. You'll have a deceased person, and the wife finds the gun in a sock drawer or something, and she gets rid of it, and we never hear about it."
After the D.C. Council approved the gun control measure 32 years ago and then-Mayor Walter E. Washington (D) signed it into law, a registration period began for residents who owned firearms before the bill was passed. For weeks, people flocked to police headquarters, lining up in halls to fill out forms that would allow them to keep their weapons. About 23,000 guns were registered, according to news accounts at the time.
Most of those were handguns. With some exceptions, clip-loaded semiautomatics, capable of rapid fire, were outlawed, and registrations were accepted only for revolvers. No one knows how many are still in the city.
In the decades since, thousands more handguns have been registered -- by D.C. police officers who are allowed to carry personal semiautomatics while off duty and by security firms that are authorized to issue revolvers to trained, police-certified guards working on private or city property. Of the registrations that have accumulated in Shelton's files over the years, 41,898 are for handguns.
And that doesn't include the untold numbers of personal handguns that federal law enforcement officers carry while off-duty and pistols carried by security guards who work on federal property. Because the District is not allowed to regulate those weapons, many security guards at federal sites carry semiautomatics that are not registered with the city; their counterparts on private and city property can carry only registered revolvers.
Then there are long guns, many thousands of them.
Although handgun ownership is prohibited for most residents who did not have them before the law took effect, rifles and shotguns are not entirely banned. To be legal, Shelton said, a rifle must have at least a 16-inch barrel, a shotgun must have at least a 20-inch barrel, and neither can be capable of semiautomatic fire. Of the 66,019 registrations, 13,919 are for shotguns, and 10,202 are for rifles.
Only D.C. residents can register guns in the city, and they must pass background checks and a 20-question written test.
As with handguns not owned by law enforcement officers, shotguns and rifles must be kept on private property, unloaded and either disassembled or fitted with trigger locks. Owners are allowed to transport their weapons only to places outside the city where gun possession is legal, such as hunting areas or target ranges.
Armed, police-certified security guards (called "special police officers," or SPOs) who work on private or city property can take their company-issued revolvers home if there is no suitable place to store them where they work, Shelton said. But the guards must "take them directly home, without any deviation," he said, and the weapons have to be kept unloaded and either trigger-locked or disassembled.
Shelton said 121 security companies have registered 2,277 revolvers for use by SPOs assigned to work on private or city property. How many take guns home after hours is anyone's guess.
The security firms also employ SPOs who work at federal sites, and the weapons issued to them (including semiautomatics) are not registered with D.C. police. No one knows how many of those guards also take guns home.
Shelton can hold forth in encyclopedic detail on the thicket of laws and rules that apply to special police officers. There's a separate maze of regulations governing off-duty D.C. and federal police officers and what types of guns, if any, they are allowed to carry in the District.
Some agencies -- the D.C. police and U.S. Park Police, for example -- fall under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, meaning officers are allowed (even required) to be armed at all times and have police powers throughout the city. Officers in other departments, such as the Library of Congress police, fall under Title 40, Shelton said. They have police powers only where they work and are not allowed to carry guns on private or city property while off duty.
"In D.C., we have all these quasi-law enforcement agencies," he said. "Everywhere, police, police, police -- it's like every federal agency in the city has its own police force. It's hard to keep up with who's under what title."
But he knows.
He's the answer man.
What about armored car guards coming into the city from Maryland and Virginia?
"Federal Armored Car Industry Reciprocity Act," Shelton said without pausing, then quoted from it. The District can't regulate the guns those guards carry.
Still, he said, "even after 14 years, I can get stumped."
A while back, a woman from Manassas called to say she wanted to visit the city with her "spudzooka team." She and her friends liked to launch potatoes out of a length of PVC pipe, igniting compressed hairspray at one end of the pipe to propel the spuds.
"I'm thinking, 'Is this a prank call?' She tells me they want to shoot potatoes at the polo grounds off Ohio Avenue. She wants to know if it's legal."
That one he had to look up.
"It's under Title 7, what we call a destructive device," he said. "Any mechanism that shoots a projectile through a smooth-bore barrel by way of an expectorant."
He laughed.
"In this case, the PVC pipe having a smooth bore, the potato being a projectile and the expectorant being the hairspray, I had to tell her they couldn't do it."
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