To anti gun ideologues the law only works in one direction.

D.C. gun-banners foiled again

On Monday, a federal judge blocked enforcement of yet another limitation the District of Columbia's city government tried to place on gun ownership for law-abiding citizens.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down D.C.'s three-decade ban on all gun ownership, upholding a lower court ruling that it infringed on citizens' Second Amendment rights. Subsequently, judges have been forced to intervene again and again to stop the District government's half-baked attempts to limit those rights to the vanishing point.

This time, the controversy involved overly stringent requirements for those seeking permits to carry concealed weapons — they had to demonstrate a "good cause" to carry, which would have effectively ruled out the vast majority of those otherwise eligible.

Neither this ruling nor any of the others will significantly increase the number of guns in D.C., as any resident can attest that the capital's criminals have been well-armed for years. Based on per capita crime numbers, their reign of terror was worst during the period of the comprehensive gun ban. The District's murder and violent crime rates have fallen dramatically since the gun ban was officially scrapped in 2008. Even so, the violent crime rate in the nation's capital remains more than twice New York's, and murder rate four times as high.

With Washington as its laboratory, the old, unconstitutional policy was a demonstrated failure. Likewise, the nationwide liberalization of gun laws during this century — including concealed, permit-less and open-carry reforms in dozens of states — has been concurrent with a huge, across-the-board drop in violent crime that has not statistically favored states with stricter gun laws. It is at least obvious that the predictions of gun-control fanatics have failed to materialize wherever their warnings have been rejected.

For District government luminaries so eager to subjugate the citizenry, the chickens have finally come home to roost. In the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia, the District government argued in court that its Metropolitan Police Department has no duty to protect the public from crime. The context was a high-profile lawsuit by three D.C. women who, thanks to police negligence, were imprisoned and repeatedly raped by home intruders over a period of more than 14 hours. Even though the victims managed to contact the police twice during their ordeal and beg for rescue, the cops merely showed up and departed both times after token efforts to investigate.

In winning the Warren case, the District government avoided paying restitution to the victims of its neglect. But it also helped bolster a legal doctrine that reinforces its inadequacy as a reliable guarantor of life and limb. It is fitting, then, that the District's busybody lawmakers are now being reigned in by a judiciary that recognizes both the limits of their wisdom and competence and the rights of the citizens they rule.