After thirty years, it really hasn’t done much to stop gun crime.

WASHINGTON - Three decades ago, at the dawn of municipal self-government in the District of Columbia, the city’s first elected mayor and council enacted one of the country’s toughest gun-control measures, a ban on handgun ownership that opponents have long said violates the Second Amendment.

All these years later, with the constitutionality of the ban now probably headed for a US Supreme Court review, a much-debated practical question remains unsettled: Has a law aimed at reducing the number of handguns in the District made city streets safer?

Although studies through the decades have reached conflicting conclusions, this much is clear: The ban, passed with strong public support in 1976, has not accomplished everything the mayor and council of that era wanted it to.

Over the years, gun violence has continued to plague the city, reaching staggering levels at times.

Gun bans aren’t just unconstitutional, they’re bad social policy.

What’s rather unique about the current challenge to DC’s gun ban going before the Supreme Court is that the folks arguing the government’s side of this are saying that the text of the 2nd amendment limits the right to bear arms to militias only.  Which requires a rather large amount of tortured interpretation of the text as written, but is also flat-out wrong when you consider that our founders considered our nation’s “militia” to be the citizens themselves. 

Remember that this country was founded by citizen-soldiers.  A situation where the government had all the guns would not only have been alien to them, it would have been the very thing they were trying to prevent in the first place.