The D.C. Zoning Commission this week directed the District’s Planning Office to re-examine proposed rules governing new gun stores after a D.C. Council member called for more retailers and less restriction.
In testimony before the commission Monday, at-large Councilman Phil Mendelson suggested rules that sanction, even welcome, secure gun stores in most medium- and high-density D.C. neighborhoods. Emergency regulations proposed by the Office of Planning and adopted by the commission in July were “unduly restrictive,” Mendelson said, and they “invite challenge either in the courts or, more likely, by Congress.”
“In short, we do not want to limit gun dealers,” said Mendelson, chairman of the council’s public safety and judiciary committee. “We want them. We want them as critical players in our gun control law.”
Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas disagreed.
“We do need to have limits on dealers and gun sales,” he said Thursday. “We need to have them in areas that are beneficial to the protection of the residents.”
The emergency rules, which last 120 days, were implemented a month after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the city’s handgun ban. They largely restrict new gun stores to downtown, and at least 600 feet from the nearest home, church, school, library or playground. The proposed permanent version comprises similar limits.
D.C. currently has no retail gun stores. The city’s one licensed gun dealer is only participating in out-of-state firearm transfers.
Harriet Tregoning, Planning Office director, told The Examiner in August that gun stores are “meant to be downtown” in the “most well-policed, regulated part of the city.”
But treating gun stores like strip clubs is unfair, Mendelson said, as there is no evidence that gun dealers are a nuisance or attract a higher incidence of crime. The commission’s focus should be security, he said, not location.
“I think the proposed regulations confuse the dislike that some … have for firearms with the actual impact that retail establishments selling firearms would actually have,” Mitchell Berger, a former D.C. government lawyer, told the commission.
Janae Grant, a Northeast advisory neighborhood commissioner, told the Zoning Commission that her constituents are opposed to firearms retail in residential areas, “period.” The commission, she said, must protect neighborhoods “from the unknown element that may arise without warning.”
A Zoning Commission decision is expected during a Nov. 20 special meeting.
