From Emily Miller:

After getting a message from someone who threatened to kill me, I was scared. I found myself in the ten-day waiting period before I could get my first gun for self-defense in my home. When the waiting was finally over, I felt a little safer.

Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Detective Kim, who had taken my case, called once a week to check on me. One week I told her that Verizon refused to give out the blocked phone number. She called Verizon’s law enforcement line to get the number, but the phone company refused without a subpoena.

The next few weeks I was a bit more relaxed but kept a careful vigilance, avoiding being caught anywhere alone. I scanned my street every morning and night to see if anyone was hiding. I’m not the only one in Washington who wanted carry rights for self-defense outside the home.

A few weeks after the call, Mary Cheh, who represents Ward 3 in the city council, happened to hold a public safety hearing about the enormous spike in crime in her ward. At the meeting, a woman stood up and said that she had been targeted by a criminal on the street.

The D.C. resident said that she was walking home on Military Rd., N.W. when a man came up to her and tried to rob her. Thinking quickly,  she claimed to be armed. “Just because I said, ‘I have a gun and will shoot,’ he ran,” she reported at the community meeting.

If there were ever a perfect example of why having the right to concealed carry is a deterrent to crime, that was it.

“So I can’t have it on the street?” the resident asked, turning to her neighbors in the rows of chairs. Someone said, “No.” The woman turned back to Ms. Cheh. “You said, ‘You can go ahead and keep it at home,’ but [this resident] answered the questions directly — you cannot have it on the streets.”

She also added, “I understand the power behind a weapon, but by the same token I think law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, we need to have some other recourse.”

I would like to say that the ultimate solution to this outrage is simply to leave Washington, D.C., and head to a location that doesn’t adhere to communist doctrine.

But the problem runs deeper than that.  My solution is too easy, and people everywhere have a right and duty to self defense.  That’s the fundamental issue with Ms. Cheh’s counsel.  There is no other recourse, since the mission of the police is not to prevent crime, but to respond to it.

Ms. Cheh’s counsel involves, quite literally, forcing law-abiding citizens to disarm (a gun in the domicile is an expensive paperweight when the threat is on the street), while only the criminals – by definition – have the guns.

It isn’t simply silly, or confusing, or wrongheaded, and it isn’t merely a policy difference between otherwise well-intentioned people.  It’s immoral, because the D.C. legal framework is forcing people to abdicate their God-given responsibilities to prevent harm to themselves in favor of the social engineering visions of utopia so precious to people like Ms. Cheh.

If your state has a similar legal framework, your mission is to get it changed.

Prior:

Christians, The Second Amendment And The Duty Of Self Defense

The Rabbi Would Take My Guns Away