EDITORIAL - On 9 March 2007, liberals lost a gun fight. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided to restore to citizens of Washington, D. C., a Constitutional right that had been denied them for 31 years. In a 2 to 1 decision, the court decided that the city’s law banning all handguns, requiring shotguns and rifles to be disassembled or locked while in the home, and additionally requiring a permit to keep such guns in the home, was a violation of the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Thanks to this enlightened decision, citizens of a city with a high rate of violent crime (20% higher than the national average in 2004) can now legally defend their homes and families with firearms. In 1976, when the District’s strict gun law was passed, the murder rate in Washington, D. C., was 26.8 per 100,000 residents. From 1976 to the present, there was no change in the gun law. However, murder rates fluctuated widely, rising to a high of 80.6 in 1991and a low of 23.5 in 1985. The restrictive gun law did not prevent murder rates from tripling fifteen years after enactment. Robbery rates, at 1003 in 1976, also fluctuated, reaching a high of 1635 per 100,000 in 1985 and a low of 621 in the year 2000. Clearly, other factors influenced violent crime rates much more significantly than the gun law. (For example, lower crime rates coincided with a decrease in population.) Undeniably, the strict gun law did not contribute to a suppression of violent crime.

It is self-evident that a criminal would prefer to prey on an unarmed citizen than an armed one. But it is not necessary to rely on common sense to grasp the value of armed citizens in suppressing crime. FBI statistics cited in a Gun Control Symposium sponsored by Saint Louis University Law School in 1999, covering the years from 1993-1996, tabulated an average of 398 justifiable homicides by police officers per year, and 299 justifiable homicides by private citizens annually. Though police officers have more frequent contact with criminals, private citizens are still responsible for a large percentage of criminals killed during the commission of a crime.

Criminals have a high degree of career inertia. That is, a criminal is likely to continue in a life of crime until interrupted by a traumatic event–arrest and conviction, injury or death. Thus, each of those 299 justifiable homicides by private citizens not only prevented the crime the criminal was engaged in, but every crime that criminal would have committed during the rest of his life outside the law.

Lethal use of privately-owned guns accounts for only a small portion of the number of crimes prevented or deterred by private citizens with guns. Estimates of the number of times guns are used in self defense range from 1.5 million per year (P. J. Cook’s and J. Ludwig’s "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" in National Institute of Justice Research in Brief, May, 1997) to over 2 million (G. Kleck’s and M. Gertz’s "Armed Resistance to Crime: the Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, volume 86(1), 1995). This means that 1.5 to 2 million would-be victims of crime owe their safety to privately owned guns. Now residents of Washington, D. C., will be able to defend themselves in the same way. No longer will a criminal predator brazenly invade a private home, knowing that the law severely restricts his victim’s access to firearms to defend himself.

The Second Amendment has long been a point of contention between liberals and conservatives. It reads, in its entirety: "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." Liberals have focused on the opening dependent clause as a loophole in the right to own a gun. In a 2002 decision upholding California’s assault weapons ban, the oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Second Amendment does not apply to individuals, but is instead a "collective right" applicable only to militias. Conservatives believe that the Constitution guarantees the individual’s right to own firearms, and that it is a vital defense against criminal predators.

Liberals abhor violence, yet they coddle violent criminals when they protest capital punishment, harsh sentencing laws, and expanded search and seizure capabilities for police. Liberals treat violence as a deadly social contagion; conservatives judge violent acts individually. For a liberal, a mob pulling an innocent motorist from his car and mercilessly beating him is no more objectionable than a line of policemen using batons, mace and tasers to break up the same violent mob. Conservatives see the criminal act as punishable violence, the law enforcement act as necessary and sanctioned violence.

Liberal opposition to individual gun ownership follows the same pattern. For liberals, any violent act that involves a gun is objectionable, whether the target is the innocent victim of a hold-up or an armed intruder who breaks into a family home in the middle of the night. This is illustrated by the statistics liberals use to bolster arguments for more stringent gun control. They tell us how many people are killed by guns, how many people are wounded or maimed by guns. But innocent victims are counted with law-breaking ones. How many of those killed by guns are criminals? How many were killed during the commission of a crime? How many were killed by a police officer defending the public, or a homeowner defending his family? Liberals see any death by gun as an argument for the elimination of guns. Conservatives see the death of an innocent person as a tragedy, the death of a criminal as a consequence of breaking the law.

So, naturally, the liberal municipal leaders of Washington, D. C., are considering an appeal of the court decision. They would rather deny guns to law-abiding citizens because fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths. But surely, the deaths of criminals during the commission of crimes should not be tallied as a cost, but rather as a benefit to society. Every crime deterred by a gun means one less citizen turned victim, one less criminal act perpetrated.

The passage of the District of Columbia’s highly restrictive gun law in 1976 did not diminish violent crime. But a decrease in violent crime will likely result from its repeal.