BELLEVUE, WA – A plan to conduct “consent searches” for guns in District of Columbia residences is “an outrageous exercise of police state demagoguery,” the Second Amendment Foundation said today.
SAF founder Alan Gottlieb condemned the plan as “a public relations effort designed to influence, through crass dramatics, Tuesday’s scheduled oral arguments on the constitutionality of the District’s handgun ban before the Supreme Court.”
“Launching this effort,” he stated, “on the eve of Supreme Court arguments over the city’s horribly failed handgun ban underscores the Draconian mentality that lies at the root of gun laws like the District handgun ban. Arthur B. Spitzer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. was right when he told the Washington Post that this ‘sends a message to the public that the police ought to be able to search your house anytime for any reason’.”
Spitzer suggested that citizens will be intimidated into allowing police into their homes without warrant. He said it “cheapens civil liberties and privacy for everyone.” District resident Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association, told the newspaper that he would not allow his home to be searched.
“How dare Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier launch this program within days of oral arguments challenging a 31-year-old extremist gun law that has already been declared unconstitutional by a federal court,” he continued. “District citizens, as well as members of Congress, should be furious.
“Calling this project the ‘Safe Homes Initiative’ is an insult to our intelligence,” Gottlieb stated. “If District residents allow this to happen, no home will be safe from warrantless fishing expeditions by police, because that’s exactly what this thinly-disguised program is really all about. We think Congress should step in immediately and stop this from happening.
“Isn’t it ironic that the District heads to the Supreme Court next week in an effort to destroy one-tenth of the Bill of Rights,” Gottlieb concluded, “while they prepare to launch the kind of police state exercise the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent.”