It’s hard to believe so much time has gone by; it’s been a little shy of three years since I wrote my first post here and kicked off what would be a lot of posts and pictures about funny Virginia license plates. At the time I was a little reluctant to sign up and participate, not actually being a blogger on my own. Writing about myself seemed to self-indulgent, and who would care? Writing for Metblogs, however, provided a structure and a reason for writing and I’ve loved it. It’s been a way to meet new people and a motivation to try new things and, perhaps most importantly, an impetus to really examine my involvement and my feelings about the things I do and see.

I credit Metblogs for helping me love this city even more,  in a dozen ways. New people, new friends, new places, new experiences, new opportunities. Like the best jobs, this one kept me on my toes and pushed me to develop new skills… sometimes under fire, sometimes by putting me next to people who knew things I didn’t, sometimes by forcing me to teach and thereby learn my subject matter even better.

That said, surely you know a eulogy when you hear it. Well, a resignation letter anyway - I’m not dying unless someone aims badly with a bottle rocket tonight. Maybe this is more an overly wordy break-up speech. It’s not you, Metblogs, it’s me.

It’s come to be time for me to move on to a different place - electronically anyway - and a different sort of writing. I’m still interested in life here in DC and I’ll be writing about it over at We Love DC, where some things will be new but others will surely stay the same. Anyone interested in a betting pool on how long before I post a picture of some interesting license plates… well, I wouldn’t go too far into double-digits if I were you.

Thanks for reading, I home you come visit me over at the new digs. Have a happy Fourth of July.

photo courtesy of Zaid Al Balushi

So when I saw this story on the front page of the WashingtonPost.com I was curious to read the story behind it. It’s an interesting one - based on the message above I’d wondered if this wasn’t a religious organization, with their message of love and empathy. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” The sign has changed notably since March 9th - the WaPo story has a small shot of the presumably current sign, though it’s small and they provide no transcription.

Unfortunately WaPo writer Nick Miroff decided to do a little editorializing in the WaPo story, which summarizes the sign’s content thusly:

The sign’s text has changed a few times, but its message has essentially remained the same: Latino immigrants have been exploited by ungrateful, racist white residents who took advantage of their labor and now want them to leave.

Anyone see any assertions of racism or ingratitude in the sign above?  This is why you should report facts and not interpret them, Mr Miroff.

Transcriptions of old and new sign after the jump. (more…)

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud to go pee.

DSC_9739, courtesy of Me

My disappointment, though, is that I was so silly as to think that the D.C. government, faced with the obvious and inevitable, would decide to just do what they have to do. No, instead Mayor Fenty et all have decided they haven’t pissed away enough of the city’s money on this battle, and rather than focus on writing gun licensing regulations that might make all of us safer and survive the inevitable legal challenges, they’re going to attempt to enforce other gun laws on the books that obviously are out of line with yesterday’s decision.

[interim D.C. Attorney General Peter] Nickles said the District will continue to enforce a separate decades-old D.C. ban on the possession of most clip-loaded semiautomatic handguns, which are popular with gun enthusiasts.

That regulation, which outlaws machine guns and was not part of the Supreme Court case, defines a machine gun in broad terms, encompassing semiautomatic weapons that can shoot, or be converted to shoot, more than 12 rounds without reloading, officials said. Nickles said that law remains on the books and will be enforced.

I can only hope that (a) the Washington Post will prod article writers Paul Duggan and David Nakamurato be a little more precise with their language in the future, since a ban on “semiautomatic weapons that can shoot, or be converted to shoot, more than 12 rounds without reloading” isn’t a limit on machine guns, it’s a limit on almost any self-loading type of pistol and (b) Nickles will read the opinion issued by the court and notice how often Scalia talks about “common” weapons. Self-loading handguns outsell revolvers 3 to 1, which pretty well fits into the definition of common.

So like it or not, enforcing this other law is just an expensive guaranteed return trip to the court in order to lose. It’s unlikely it will get far; this is so obvious on its face that the lower courts are going to rule against the city and appeals likely won’t get far. However that doesn’t mean it’s not a waste of resources we can’t afford. Let’s accept reality and work within it, and be ready for the inevitable other lawsuits that are going to come up over license restrictions. The universe - and the NRA - give away trouble for free. There’s no need to go looking for it.

UPDATE: Just noticed that Ben Winograd over on SCOTUSBlog addresses this idiocy, provides a salient example, and suggests that DC should fix this statute before the courts or the congress fixes it for them. Starts on paragraph 6.

April fool, courtesy of Djuliet

A few weeks ago the Washington Post ran an editorial by Patrick Smith, a pilot and writer whose work I have been enjoying on Salon for several years now. I missed it at the time, but caught some of the letters to the editor in response, and honestly was kind of surprised by the vitrol. What are these people angry about, I wondered? This is the guy who has never failed to rail against airline stupidity and TSA uselessness and these folks are responding as if he’s some sort of apologist?

How do you go from a writer who writes this:

I don’t know about you, but each time I settle into one of those blasted seats, the first thing I wonder is what malformed extraterrestrial creature it could possibly have been designed for. Clearly it was not intended for a human being

to a reaction like “Nice try, Mr. Smith,” implying that he’s a co-conspirator?

It’s a fair reaction, I suppose, to someone not familiar with his work and previously stated opinion. Smith is no more a passenger advocate than industry apologist - he’s a writer about the flying experience and not afraid to give a moronic passenger their lumps either. It’s to his credit that in his followup on Salon this week he takes his lumps - which he, rightly I think, identifies as partly caused by the headline WaPo stuck on his piece for him - and uses it as a jumping off point for some interesting facts about pilot careers. The swipes he takes at poor industry service on page 2 would probably come as a significant surprise to the people who think he’s an airline shill.

I highly recommend his work. He’s an entertaining writer and full of neat facts about the flying life. Some of it I knew by virtue of my amateur pilot dad, but there’s plenty more in there that’s new to anyone who’s never been behind the throttle of some big iron. Check it out.

pilots in motion, courtesy of pbo31

Before this Court petitioners have stated that “if the handgun ban is struck down and respondent registers a handgun, he could obtain a license, assuming he is not otherwise disqualified,” by which they apparently mean if he is not a felon and is not insane. Brief for Petitioners 58. Respondent conceded at oral argument that he does not “have a problem with . . . licensing” and that the District’s law is permissible so long as it is “not enforced in an arbitrary and capricious manner.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 74–75. We therefore assume that petitioners’ issuance of a license will satisfy respondent’s prayer for relief and do not address the licensing requirement.

The court hasn’t said there’s a problem with licensing, and in other places in the opinion stated outright that some restrictions on the what, where, and how of having a weapon are perfectly okay. So what’s probably going to happen - any grandstanding to the contrary - is that the DC government is going to have to set up some structure for license applications and start processing them. The people who have been waiting with baited breath for this decision are probably going to wet themselves with anger, but the reality is that it’s unlikely any court will order them to have this done and operational in a very short period of time. Personally I’d wager that the process will be set up and operational no sooner than 60 days from now, very possibly even longer.

The devil here is in the details, though, and what exactly the licensing rules look like. Will the council be involved in drafting the rules or will they hand it off to an existing department? If you want press credentials in DC you go to a police spokesperson - will the council put the police in charge of issuing licenses or will they create a new body? What information will they want, and how many lawsuits are we going to see over that, given federal restrictions on how long you can jerk around with background checks and the like? Tom says the AG indicates you can expect to be fingerprinted, but what the city will want to do with those fingerprints is an interesting question.

All those questions assume that there’s not going to be a lot of pointless grandstanding and refusals, or writing of deliberately bad law. Maybe I’m giving the District leaders too much credit, but I presume they know better than to pass a licensing law that is so restrictive that nobody can qualify. That would surely be a one-way ticket to a court order, assuming the congresscritters don’t get involved. Aside from the fact that I think we have what could be the basis of a pretty good compromise here (you can have a gun but you need a license and you have to keep it at home), we don’t do the case for D.C. independent rule any good when the people who do the ruling look like unlawful jackasses.

ALBERTA, MEDICINE HAT 1915/1921 (horse) Team license plate courtesy of woody1778a

Update: Tom Goldstein is a funny guy. “Tom Goldstein - The Morgan Stanley opinion holds that FERC was required to apply the Mobile Sierra presumption. There, everyone knows what they came here to find out.”

Heller has been affirmed, and the court says there is indeed an individual right to a firearm. This is pretty big for everyone in the country, not just D.C. - it potentially will impact all kinds of gun regulations, not just overt bans.

Don’t strap on your six-shooter just yet, Marion Barry - there’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking to be done over the actual opinion first.

Update 2: Don’t forget that as official materials come in - i.e., the actual written opinion from the court - they’ll be linked here, on the SCOTUSWiki page for D.C. v Heller.

Update 3: Here’s the opinion. [pdf]

Tom Goldstein wrote on SCOTUSBlog on Monday his speculation that the Heller majority opinion would be written by Justice Scalia, which is probably going to be great news if you’re in favor of an individual right to own a gun versus the more traditional collective militia interpretation. Goldstein points out that Scalia is the only justice who hasn’t penned a majority opinion from the cases in March’s sittings - and this is the last of March’s cases - though of course this assumes (a) Scalia will be on the pro-gun side - probably a fair guess - and (b) that the pro-gun contingent is going to carry this decision, which sure sounded that way from the oral arguments.

That’s divergent from what Mike O’Shea predicted right after oral arguments, when he believed that Justice Roberts or Kennedy would be writing the opinion, though both think there’s going to be an individual right component to the decision.

The reasonable thing to wonder in response to that is, of course, so what? What’s that really mean for people visiting and living in the district? Well, Nina Totenberg’s NPR article here points out that the DC law as it stands doesn’t prohibit residents from keeping what I’d call “long guns” at home for protection, provided that they’re trigger-locked or disassembled, so odds are we’re just going to see that residents will be able to keep pistols as well as rifles at home. Whether they’ll have to continue to be locked is more up in the air. Justice Scalia certainly seemed pretty firmly on the side of self-protection, and DC circuit court ruling said not just that Heller had the right to have the gun at home, but also loaded and unlocked.

I think we can be pretty much certain that at the end of this there’s not going to be any expectation that you’re going to have the right to have a gun out and about with you when you travel through town, visible or not. That might be the next fight Heller and others like him choose to pick, but I’d be overtly astonished if there’s any overt statement on that kind of matter in the decision. The Court likes to give a thumbs up or down to lower court decisions without further narrowing, and the Circuit opinion outright says “Heller does not claim a legal right to carry a handgun outside his home, so we need not consider the more difficult issue whether the District can ban the carrying of handguns in public, or in automobiles.” Or in other words, we’re going to punt and just ignore this sub-issue. Bet on a follow-up case - if this goes as expected and residents are allowed to have guns in their home - over being able to transport them to and fro.

See you at the range.

Guns In Grey, courtesy of barjack

Tim Russert - PRSA International Conference - Philadelphia, PA, courtesy of hyku

I don’t know that I have a lot to say about the matter, other than it being somewhat interesting that this kind of thing crops up wayyyyyy out in the burbs rather than in the city. I wonder who their market is, or what their necessary purpose might be. After all, if you don’t approve of Plan B, you’re just as able to not get a prescription for it filled at CVS as you are at DMC Pharmacy. Is it that important to be able to fill your prescription for penicillin somewhere that there’s no condoms on the rack, tempting you?

Perhaps it’ll all a way to get a job for a friend or family member who is a pharmacist who finds himself unemployable at the majors because he won’t dispense birth control pills. Beyond that I’m hard pressed to understand the need for this business - when you open an alternative to Outback you don’t serve everything BUT meat, you have an entirely different set of offerings. What’s DMC Pharmacy going to bring to the table other than… what it doesn’t put out on the table?