Regular readers know that Trump took over policing in Washington, D.C., declaring a crime emergency.
As for the legality of it, from a Constitutional perspective, D.C. is a federal territory and the central federal government has a right to run it directly with no input from the local populace at all. This is true of all federal territories. But for a long time, Congress has granted to D.C. what is known as ‘home rule’ which essentially allows it to be run mostly, but not completely, like a state. But one exception to the Home Rule Act is found in D.C. Code § 1–207.40 which you can read here:
This law states that:
(a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, whenever the President of the United States determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes, he may direct the Mayor to provide him, and the Mayor shall provide, such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the President may deem necessary and appropriate.
It goes on to say that such Presidential control is limited to 48 hours unless Trump has notified various congresscritters about why he is doing this. Then it is limited to when the emergency ends, when 30 days pass, or when Congress passes a joint resolution ending it, whichever happens first. Or Congress can pass a joint resolution allowing it to go further than 30 days. And one wrinkle a lot of people miss is that the 30 days begins when Congress is in session, though we don’t believe that this exception applies here.
Still, this author wondered just how much Trump can do in essentially 30 days. Could he really make that much of a difference in around a month?
And then we saw this:
(An image of a famous character being happy to receive a gun seems particularly appropriate in this context).
Naturally, the younger Donald Trump is linking to an article from Fox News which says:
President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in Washington, D.C., includes streamlining the gun permitting process for law-abiding residents looking to protect themselves, Fox News Digital has learned.
The concealed carry permitting process and firearm registration process in the deep blue city have been slashed from months down to days via Trump’s Making DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force…
Just to break in here for a moment, calling it the ‘Making DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force’ is such a Trump thing to call a task it, and we are honestly laughing about it. Love him or hate him, we can totally hear him in our minds saying ‘we are going to call it the Making DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force because we are going to make D.C. safe and beautiful.’
Back to the article:
…which was established via an executive order in March to revitalize the nation’s capital. The working group’s work to clean up the city did not include changing local gun laws, but instead streamlines the city’s already established process, so law-abiding residents can more easily navigate the firearms system.
‘President Trump is not only stopping violent crime in Washington, D.C., he is also streamlining the permitting process for law-abiding residents who want the ability to protect themselves and their families,’ White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Fox News Digital. ‘The Making DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force has been working with local officials to eliminate longstanding obstacles and successfully reduced the average permit processing time from several months to just five days.’
Under the task force’s efforts, locals are able to book next-day appointments to register their firearms with the Metropolitan Police Department, while walk-in appointments are now available and advertised on the police department’s website.
Since our readers tend to be strong supporters of the Second Amendment, most of you probably know that District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) is the Supreme Court case that kicked off the modern revitalization of the Second Amendment as an individual right, at least in the courts. As you can notice by the caption that was a case against the local government of D.C. And naturally, Mr. Heller won, the Supreme Court finding that this enclave violated Mr. Heller’s Second Amendment rights.
But, as often is the case, even if you win in court and the court says that the government is violating your rights, the government can still try to resist any attempt to end that violation. Democrats are historically good at this, engaging in ‘massive resistance’ to efforts to desegregate our institutions in the 1950’s and 60’s. And as much as Democrats claim that there was some kind of ‘party switch’ around 1965 or so, they seem to have kept that playbook and have been applying it to the Second Amendment. For years we have seen reports of how D.C. passed new laws attempting to keep the people of D.C. (and visitors) disarmed and resorting to tactics such as slow-walking the permit process. Now it appears that this Trump task force is reducing this problem in D.C. to more manageable levels.
So, if you are a D.C. resident and this might be the time to apply for the relevant permits.
We don’t think that is literally correct. We are okay, for instance, with saying that if you have robbed banks in the past, you are no longer allowed to legally carry a gun, so we support limited restrictions on Second Amendment rights. But we appreciate people being this ‘hard core’ on gun rights, to counteract the hard core gun control nutjobs.
Sorry, Fuzzy Chimp, you can't have this for your next MMMM post.
Sorry, what? We don’t see how he gets that from the story. You could argue the current laws do this, but Trump had nothing to do with them and, as a practical matter, it would be very hard to change them.
Gun control makes less sense than usual when talking about D.C. gun bans. If you want a gun that is illegal in D.C. you only have to go about ten miles and cross the Potomac into Virginia, where you can buy a lot of guns that are illegal in D.C. and then go about ten miles back to have your gun there. That probably isn’t legal, but our point is that it is laughably easy for criminals to get around the rules for one geographically tiny city, so the only people these laws are actually disarming are the people who obey the law, which are exactly the kinds of people who should be armed.
This why when we hear a leftist say that we should ban all guns, or ban assault weapons or something like that, we often say, ‘so, you support Trump’s wall?’ Because gun control of any kind without border control is just dumb. If our borders are open but you try to ban guns, then criminals will use the same channels that they use to bring in people, to bring in illegal guns—just as they presently do with drugs and other illegal goods.
But gun control in a single American city is even dumber, because under the Constitution there can’t be border control within America. Under Supreme Court precedent, the federal government can work to keep people from other countries out, but states and territories cannot work to keep people from other states and territories out (except maybe in an emergency). And under the Fourth Amendment, they can’t typically search every car for guns as they come into the state. We want very little gun control, but proposing a gun control law for any unit smaller than the entirety of America is just dumb and worse than pointless because it only disarms people who habitually obey the law. Again, those are exactly the best people to have guns.
This is a fair point. The legal regime in D.C. is probably itself still unconstitutional and one can wish that Trump or Congress would loosen things up as many people have said online. But the D.C. Code doesn’t let Trump change the laws of D.C. under these emergency powers—he can only enforce the laws that currently exist. In theory, Trump could also just refuse to enforce the anti-gun laws that he believes are unconstitutional but again, his emergency powers only last for thirty days. If he wants to make lasting change to crime rate in D.C., a sudden influx of law-abiding citizens legally carrying guns is a good place to start.
Still, we think that Trump should consider an aggressive approach to federal pardons where Trump reviews every gun charge brought in any federal territory and considers pardoning anyone who merely illegally possessed a gun under gun control laws that are too restrictive. That won’t change the law permanently, but a temporary relief from these laws seems like a good idea.
And likewise, another thing Trump can do is to declare that he will review and aggressively hand out early pardons to any person who defends themselves and others but find themselves prosecuted, anyway, as was done to Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse. Make it clear that self-defense and defense of others is legal again in D.C. and give law-abiding citizens guns, and we are betting the crime rate will plummet.
And we bet Democrats will take credit for it. Sigh.
Suing is all they seem to do these days. And it is hard not to think that the leadership of the Democratic party is objectively pro-criminal.
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