Armed and dangerous

What's that old joke - "Guns don't kill people: jealous husbands who come home early kill people"?

If you've ever watched the disturbingly fascinating television show "Snapped," you know that jealous wives who come home early do too.

There is, of course, nothing funny about the gun violence that Black Panther H. Rap Brown once called "as American as apple pie." As abhorrent as most Americans find said violence, though, it should be hard to be surprised by the Supreme Court's ruling this week that Washington, D.C.'s prohibition of handgun ownership is unconstitutional.

Mayors from Chicago to Los Angeles are decrying the ruling, since it is they and their police departments who have to deal with the deadly detritus resulting from gun violence. Who can argue with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who said in a television interview that the court's decision will make his city's streets even more dangerous?

All I can say if that's true is, "Heaven help us." Chicago, you see, had 325 homicides last year, the overwhelming majority committed with guns.

It's hard to imagine more people getting blown away on the streets and in the homes of Washington and Chicago as a result of the court's ruling than are slain now. There've been 85 homicides in Washington so far this year, and there were 181 for all of last year.

Those figures, remarkably, are less than half the homicide rates during the 1990s, when cheap guns and the crack cocaine trade had the District of Columbia's streets resembling Dodge City on a Saturday night. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 30,000 Americans still die from gun violence each year.

Despite some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, gun violence in the nation's capital remains a blight on the nation. How, for instance, can we police violence in distant parts of the world when citizens are regularly being gunned down mere blocks from the White House -- the place where the president and first lady lay their heads most nights?

The president and first lady, though, are more likely to awaken to the peaceful sound of birds chirping than to the rat-tat-tat of a drug dealer's automatic exacting vengeance for a shady drug deal.

Are more thugs going to go out and arm themselves because of the Supremes' decision? Not likely.

What will happen, as Chicago's Daley aptly pointed out, is that more people will be killed accidentally. The self-protection argument that the National Rifle Association trots out as a cover for gun dealers' profits will be proven false.

Sure, each time some elderly grandmother defends herself against an intruder with a gun, the NRA and its talk radio allies will hail her as a freedom fighter.

Such cases aren't common, though, and cops will tell you that the more likely scenario is that one of the grandkids will find the gun in Grandma's nightstand and accidentally kill a sibling.

As Daley said, "We've shown time and time again how many children have been killed in their homes by guns!" For the record, the CDC reports there were more than 800 gun deaths ruled accidental in 2005, the last year for which statistics were available.

No one should be surprised that the doctrinaire Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, offered up the strictest, most conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment prohibition against restricting gun ownership. After all, they're not likely to find themselves on those same city streets where gun blasts outnumber chirping birds.