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Councilmember Says McCain Playing Politics with People’s Lives
Washington, D.C. – Today, Councilmember David Catania (At-Large) joined Kenny Barnes, founder of ROOT Inc., and other District officials to criticize a recent effort to weaken the District’s newly enacted gun regulations. Last week, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-MT) introduced the “Second Amendment Enforcement Act,” which would put District residents at greater risk of gun violence. The bill was co-introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressmen Travis Childers (D-MS) and Mark Souder (R-IN). In front of a heavily attended press conference, Catania forcefully criticized this latest effort to meddle with the District’s local affairs and suggested that certain members of Congress would be better served by solving the issues facing their own constituents.
“Why is it that every time a member of Congress from some far off place finds his or herself in a tough re-election campaign, they decide to meddle with the District of Columbia?” asked Catania. “Senator McCain is fighting for his political life in Arizona, so he has decided to play politics with the real lives of District residents. This is a dangerous political stunt.”
Catania also noted that McCain was on the ballot in the District less than two years ago and failed to garner more than 6.5 percent of the vote.
“It’s unusual for members of Congress who wish to obstruct our ability to legislate for ourselves to ever stand before District residents. Not so with John McCain. District voters soundly rejected his agenda during the last election cycle,” said Catania before adding, “Senator McCain campaigned for more than a year on his ‘honor,’ but I see nothing honorable about putting our residents in harm’s way simply to score political points with his constituents 2,300 miles away. That is not ‘Country First.’”
The McCain-Tester bill would change the District’s current gun regulations by:
· Eliminating the requirement that firearms in private homes be unloaded and either disassembled or secured;
· Prohibiting a landlord from banning guns from rented homes or offices;
· Repealing the District’s registration requirement for firearms; and
· Overturning the District’s restriction on semiautomatic weapons, specifically by repealing the definition of a machine gun as any firearm which shoots semi-automatically more than 12 shots without manual reloading.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court overturned the District’s previous law prohibiting the possession of handguns in 2008. After the decision the Council immediately reworked its regulations to comply with the Court’s decision, expanding the types of handguns that can be legally registered while instituting several common sense requirements to decrease the risk of further gun violence in the District. Last month U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled that the new regulations were appropriate and complied with the Court’s 2008 decision. Frustrated by Urbina’s decision, the National Rifle Association, McCain, and Tester are now attempting to make the District the only state or jurisdiction in the United States that cannot formulate and adopt its own gun regulations.
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