Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller highlights a new report on Washington, D.C., homicide rates in the wake of a court order ending the District’s handgun ban.
Eliminating the District of Columbia’s comprehensive handgun ban had almost no effect on homicides committed with or without such firearms in the nation’s capital, according to an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.
Nearly 80 percent of all D.C. homicide victims from 2000 through 2007 were killed with a gun, city and federal data compiled by The Washington Post and analyzed by TheDCNF found. That figure dropped to 74 percent after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that Washington’s handgun ban was unconstitutional in 2008. …
… The post-Heller decrease was observed despite a 2013 incident in which one man killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. Attacker Aaron Alexis launched his attack with a shotgun.
“I expect murders to fall,” Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott told TheDCNF. “How they fall is a different question. The people who generally obeyed the ban were law-abiding citizens and not the criminals.”
He noted that drug gangs – which are frequently the shooters in D.C. homicides – obtained handguns regardless of whether the ban was in place.
