BELLEVUE, WA – When District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer attempted to justify the District’s handgun ban as it announced its appeal of the Parker case to the Supreme Court, she revealed the depth of hypocrisy that lies at the core of this case, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.
“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” Singer reportedly said, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”
That remark brought a quick reaction from SAF founder Alan Gottlieb.
“The District, and the people who are elected to run it, have been standing by for years while citizens have been dying,” Gottlieb said. “A string of administrations dating back 30 years have callously allowed residents of our nation’s capitol to die, to be assaulted, robbed and raped because they have been legally disarmed and left defenseless by this insidious gun ban.”
He cited language in the District’s petition to appeal of further evidence of the outrageous insensitivity for the harm that this unconstitutional ban has wrought. The petition notes – as quoted by the Washington Post – that “No other provision of the Bill of Rights even arguably requires a government to tolerate serious physical harm on anything like the scale of the devastation worked by handguns.”
“The District of Columbia has been tolerating murder and mayhem on a horrendous scale for three decades,” Gottlieb stated, “in the stubborn defense of an insane ban that statistics show has been a public safety disaster. Singer and Mayor Adrian Fenty can try to spin the history of this travesty any way they want, but the fact remains that the continued defense of this ban represents a flagrant disregard for the personal safety of every law-abiding citizen in the city.
“How dare the city contend that this ban has improved public safety,” he concluded. “It is now clear that the Fenty Administration is far less interested in the safety of its citizens than it is in the defense of a clearly failed, 30-year-old liberal anti-gun philosophy that epitomizes the moral bankruptcy of gun control.”