kim-jong-il-team-america_crLet’s look at gun ownership in large and ill-run jurisdictions. The Washington Times’s Emily Miller describes the latest brainstorm from the City of Crackheads and Congressmen, and a police force that wants to know where every law-abiding citizen’s gun is, but which makes scant efforts to disarm violent felons, and is too inept (or too unmotivated) to close most homicide cases. Miller is the lady who made herself famous by actually trying to get a gun license all through the run-around produced by DC’s incompetent, lazy politicians and police. She writes:

The latest gun-control scheme that starts on Jan. 1 will force every legal firearm owner in the nation’s capital to go in person to police headquarters to renew their registration certificates.

The Metropolitan Police Department filed proposed rules last week to enact this absurd law, and citizens have until Dec. 15 to comment on the regulations.

To avoid becoming a felon, anyone with a gun registered before 2011 will have to go to police headquarters to be fingerprinted, photographed, provide proof of address, pay a fee and confirm they may still legally possess the firearm. The Firearms Registration Section will then create a new registration certificate — now in the form of an ID card — for each gun.

While this is primarily a hard-news report, Miller, who’s the editor in charge of the paper’s (conservative) editorial page, can’t resist editorializing:

This operation could end up making the rollout of Obamacare look smooth and easy.

But she might be excused for that. After all, in Washington, most criminals, even murderers, know they’ll never get hauled into the station, hassled, and fingerprinted, but legal gun owners will. They get to do this every three years, and it appears they don’t even get to pick the date: the city does that for you, because it’s DC and they assume everyone’s a no-job welfare leech with no particular place to be, like their own families. And you get to pay the cops $13. Per renewal. Per gun. So Read The Whole Thing™.

OK, but the DC police are a national laughinstock. Once professional, they were destroyed by the mayoralty of crackhead mayor Marion Barry, and by several very-PC but even-more-inept police chiefs, of whom the incumbent, Cathy Lanier, seems the least capable of finding her own posterior aspect with both hands, a GPS, and all DC’s detectives in their usual state of full-on sleep apnea. Even in a case where victims identify the violent criminals, these bums make excuses, not arrests. So maybe it’s not the policy, it’s the incompetence. How do policies like this work in a city with a less dysfunctional police force?

Well, another newsman has the answer to that. Here’s John Stossel (hat tip, the Gun Wire) on the process of getting a pistol permit in New York.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsM-HVQSdTI

Except for this: Stossel didn’t get his permit. While he complied with all the written requirements, including the 17-page-form, it turns out the major one is an unwritten one: you have to know somebody, or perhaps bribe somebody.

This is what gun-control advocates like Mike Bloomberg call “common-sense gun law.” One of the guys interviewed by Stossel describes what results from this kind of “common sense”: an old man beaten to death while the police took their sweet time responding. Maybe too common and not enough sense, these ideas.

NYC has had this policy for decades, and one of these days it might even solve or prevent a crime. Hasn’t done so yet.

About Hognose

Former Special Forces 11B2S, later 18B, weapons man. (Also served in intelligence and operations jobs in SF).

3 thoughts on “Owning a gun in a failed state

Aesop

When someone is found in contempt of court, they are subject to indefinite detention based upon the whims of the judge.

Thus my curiousity at why SCOTUS and/or any federal judge hasn’t commanded the appearance of any number of officialdom from the respective cities, and had them carted off to the federal pokey to await his/her/their pleasure for contempt of any number of rulings until suddenly gun permits are handed out like EBT cards.

Personally, once we get an American president again, I’d support sending in either federal troops, or federalized NG units, to start handing out CMP rifles and a bandolier apiece in front of the DCPD HQ, just to make the point. Let my people go.

Dean Weingarten

I once said that living in a *reliably* corrupt state works pretty well, if you have the money to pay the bribes. The problem with D.C. is that you cannot count on the officials to be reliably corrupt.

Another exceptionally well written article.

Hognose Post author

Really, most of the work was done by Emily Miller and John Stossel. I only merged the two very similar bureaucratic nightmares into a single story. In any “shall-but-won’t-issue” environment, it’s about the same: Boston, LA, Honolulu.

Right now, the system runs more on cronyism than on bribery… it’s like getting a table at a snooty restaurant, or getting a favor from a Mafia don. Mere money is not enough; you have to be connected. ISTR there’s a zillionaire in NYC who was busted for a gun in his apartment, and another in DC who’s being prosecuted over a spent cartridge case.