Another article on it:
http://www.mercurynews.com/nationworld/ci_11855277
Gun rights and voting rights clash in DC
By Jim Abrams
Associated Press
Posted: 03/06/2009 05:02:45 PM PST
WASHINGTON — The nation's capital city faces a dilemma: To obtain long-denied voting rights in Congress, the District of Columbia may have to accept looser gun laws that city officials say will make the streets more dangerous.
House Democratic leaders also are in a quandary. Stripping out the Senate's gun measure risks the wrath of the National Rifle Association and critical support of gun-rights Democrats. Keep the gun language, and liberals who favor gun control might kill the bill.
The predicament forced House leaders to postpone a vote this week. And it's unclear whether the bill will come up next week as Democrats wrestle with a looming threat from the NRA to unleash its forces if the House removes the Senate measure dismantling the capital city's restrictions on rapid-fire, semi-automatic weapons and gun registration requirements.
Just two weeks ago, it looked like D.C. and its 600,000 residents would soon get voting representation in Congress that has eluded them for two centuries. Now faced with an either-or choice, some city council members trying to find a compromise are floating the idea of adopting gun laws similar to those in neighboring Maryland.
Council member Mary Cheh says she could live with Maryland's gun control laws but adds that Congress shouldn't have to "kneel down" to pressure from the gun lobby.
"We are troubled that gaining one right of self-determination may come at the price of another,"
said city council Chairman Vincent Gray. "I find this move to gut our gun laws through the voting rights bill extremely offensive."
The developments have been disheartening to D.C. residents who pay federal taxes and fight in the military but have been denied a vote in Congress since the parameters of the capital were set in 1801. Even with a favorable vote by Congress and President Barack Obama's promised signature, they still might not get it. A constitutional challenge in court has been promised by opponents.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's nonvoting delegate to the House, said the Senate-approved provision allowing people who live within blocks of the White House to own military-style sniper weapons "is so reckless and radical that it puts at risk everybody from the president down to the kids that the amendment would allow to possess weapons."
The NRA and its many allies in Congress have been targeting the capital city since the Supreme Court, in a historic 5-4 decision last June, affirmed that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applied to private citizens and ruled that the District's 32-year-old ban on handgun possession was unconstitutional.
District officials have since rewritten their laws to accommodate the court decision, but the NRA insists that D.C. residents are still deprived of their Second Amendment rights.
The NRA has not lobbied actively on the issue so far, but lawmakers widely fear that it will "score" — include in its ratings of lawmaker support for gun rights issues — votes on any Democratic attempt to bring up a voting rights bill excluding the gun amendment.
"We will continue to pursue every legislative and legal option available to address the concerns" of Second Amendment supporters, said Chris W. Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist.
The NRA feels emboldened after the Supreme Court decision last year, said Rep. Bart Stupak, a gun rights Democrat from northern Michigan who supported the voting rights bill in 2007. If there were an insistence that the gun and voting rights issue be linked, "I and others would probably support that."
"The two issues now have joined. I don't see them coming apart again," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., who also backed both the D.C. gun bill and the voting rights bill in the past.
On the other side is Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., elected to Congress on a gun control agenda in 1996 after a gunman opened fire on passengers in a Long Island Railroad train, killing her husband. She said she and others would not be able to vote for the voting rights bill if the gun provision is attached.
"It's a sad situation," she said. "We're caught in a box here." The NRA's ties to lawmakers are too strong, she said. "If the NRA says jump, they jump."
