A Blooming Arms Race in D.C.?

This summer, D.C. police officers are planning to carry semiautomatic rifles while on patrol. D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier says: "We want to be prepared. I want officers to have what they need to be safe." At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding a challenge to the District's handgun ban. In that case, a D.C. resident uses a similar rationale: He wants to pack a handgun at home for personal safety. If the high court nullifies the handgun law before it adjourns this month, the summer of 2008 could be quite scary, with both police and citizenry arming themselves with new firearms.

Some will see "packing" as a necessary response to a sadly violent society. But my belief is that a race to arms would be toxic madness.

Let's go back to 1975. President Nixon, a year earlier, called the District the "crime capital of America." Armed violence was rampant. I was assisting then-D.C. Council member Dave Clarke in his efforts to design a better firearms policy for our hometown. On a Saturday afternoon, we convened in Dave's tiny apartment overlooking the Washington Hilton. With his toddler son running about, we sat for hours trying to figure out an effective way to reduce the potential for handgun violence. Our drafting board was a kitchen table crowded with law books, crime statistics and crumpled drafts that distilled into our current handgun law.

Clarke's efforts, later embraced by the full council, were grounded in two principles. First, he believed Congress had given the council full authority to set public safety policy. Second, while he believed that D.C. residents should have rifles for sporting use outside the city, he felt it was dangerous to allow extensive private ownership of loaded handguns inside the District, a dense, apartment-filled, tourist-laden, purely urban environment secured by more armed and trained police than anywhere else in the country.

In 1975, the D.C. Council could not have foreseen that drug wars spawned by a national cocaine epidemic in the 1980s would engulf the law's effectiveness in the 1990s. Hope for a national handgun control policy became a pipe dream. After Sept. 11, 2001, we became a fearful capital and country. And now, a police chief seemingly believes that patrol officers are not safe enough merely carrying standard-issue Glock pistols. And so a growing number of citizens want to own handguns, with some asking whether we are less safe than we were years ago and whether it is time for a change in local firearms policy.

The Supreme Court will soon tell us whether the Second Amendment trumps the D.C. Council's public safety recipe. But, if we are told that handguns must be as available in this 69-square-mile city as they are in the Rockies, let's find a way to prevent a mounting arsenal in our neighborhoods. It may be time to have Dave Clarke-style kitchen table brainstorming all over the city: citizens seeking responses to tough questions. Will handguns under many pillows and a high-powered rifle on every patrol officer's shoulder make us safer? Who is the enemy we would be arming against? Has expanded access to weapons delivered personal safety in Beirut or Kabul?

I believe the principles underlying the council's policy judgment outlawing handguns still pertain. We remain thickly populated. As a world hub, we attract more visitors than ever before. With the buildup of homeland security agencies, the presence of trained law enforcement officers has burgeoned. Tolerating a proliferation of privately owned pistols will endanger police and residents alike and undercut courageous nonviolence program such as Peaceoholics, the Alliance of Concerned Men and others. Block by block, home by home, we need to implement calming tactics -- not deadly self-help.

-- Gregory E. Mize

Washington

The writer is a retired D.C. trial judge and, before that, was general counsel to the D.C. Council.