By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier, reacting to the federal court ruling about carry in the District told reporters that “Law-abiding citizens that register firearms, that follow the rules, are not our worry,” echoing what Second Amendment activists and most rank-and-file police officers have been saying for years.
Whether guns are registered or not, depending upon the jurisdiction, the story is essentially the same. Legally-armed citizens pose no real problem for police, which is one reason that the federal court ruling that declared the city’s ban on carry outside the home is unconstitutional.
When the city immediately allowed people to carry, but then was granted a stay about 48 hours later, Lanier had an opportunity to contradict a remark by Delroy Burton, who heads the city’s police union, that officers will need to change their “mind-set” about dealing with people carrying concealed firearms, according to the Washington Post.
“We deal with concealed carry every single day in this city, I don’t care what anybody tells you,” Lanier said, according to the newspaper. She noted the large number of plainclothes federal police who carry every day in the District. “Legal guns, legally carried, there’s hundreds of them out there in this city every single day. . . . That’s not a big training gap for us,” she said.
The city was granted a 90-day stay, which will be up in October. By then, the city will have either filed an appeal of the ruling handed down in July by U.S. District Judge Frederick J. Scullin, or will have crafted an ordinance regarding carry in the district. For the time being, the situation remains as it was prior to the Scullin decision.
Lanier also had another interesting comment that may not have been received well by anti-gunners.
“When Heller came out in 2008, people said, ‘Oh, street crime’s going to go down’,” she recalled. “Well, Heller only allows you to have a handgun in your home, and guess what happened? Burglaries went up. So I don’t know that there’s any valid debate on the crime side. My one focus, really, now is going to be security of our dignitaries in those really highly sensitive large events.”
