On the way home from work on Thursday, September, 11th, I was listening to NPR on the radio (on local station WAMU) where they did a short interview with Washington DC's Congressional Delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton.
The discussion centered on Federal Funds spent to protect Washington, DC from a terrorist attack. The interviewer then asked what was the biggest act to protect Washington, DC from another attack (or what was the biggest threat to DC) and she basically said that the biggest 'terrorist threat' to Washington, DC was the push in Congress to permit legal gun ownership by Washington, DC residents. (Actually, she stated it the other way around in terms of defeating another bill that would have removed all local restrictions limiting legal gun ownership. But the meaning and end result is the same.)
Unfortunately, I am unable to locate the audio or transcript of the interview but I know what I heard. If anyone can locate that interview, I would love to put her exact words up here but seems that as she was a small part in a bigger story the transcript is not up. But how about that. Either she is comparing law abiding gun owners with terrorists or she is completely dismissing the terrorist threat. After all, on September 11th, the terrorists did not attack using guns, legal or not. They attacked using box cutters and hijacked commercial airliners.
Here is a link to an audio interview she did on 10 September.
"Why would we make the Nation's Capital a wide open country for guns seven years after 9/11?" - Eleanor Holmes Norton, 10 September 2008
She is clearly scaremongering and not only that; she is in effect demonizing law abiding gun owners. And you would think that people are trying to force DC to be the first District in the US to permit gun ownership and not one of the last. That people are going to be walking around DC with assault rifles and "Uzi handguns", just like the DC sniper and other criminals. There is the rub in all this in that all the current laws do is prevent lawful owners from owning firearms. The criminals already have the guns. She is also very disingenuously claiming that they will not be able to track who has guns, because the bill will ban handgun registration, as if they know who has the guns now, with the city swimming in gun crime.
Not only that but she completely distorts who the NRA represents, picturing it as an 'evil' lobby of the gun industry. Sure you can call it a lobby but for gun owners. And the only reason gun owners need a group to lobby Congress on their behalf, is because of Congressmen and women like Mrs. Norton who take a right and arbitrarily, and illegally, decide to take that right away from the law abiding because they don't have the stomach or willpower to put those who use the right in prison where they belong.
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