Supreme Court And Gun Control

PASSAGES Tim Spicer's funeral, November 27.

Image: Stephen Voss

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On the night of November 17, I was at a bar mitzvah for the son of an officer of a top investment bank. It was a wonderful, lavish affair held for about 200 guests at a synagogue in Washington's affluent Cleveland Park neighborhood. There was a video tribute to the boy and a seated dinner served under pasha-style tents.

Across town that evening, another young man, Tim Spicer, was getting off work at Ben's Chili Bowl, in the U Street corridor, a neighborhood once known as the black Broadway because the likes of Duke Ellington performed there. I had become friends with Tim after years of eating at Ben's, a D.C. institution whose walls are adorned with photos of such famous customers as Bono and Bill Cosby. He was fantastically nice. He always helped me jump the line to get a half-smoke, my regular artery-clogging sausage. He would chat with my nine-year-old son and tell me about his aspirations. Tim had dropped out of high school, but he got his G.E.D. and wanted to attend Howard University. In his spare time, he rapped and drew fashion sketches. He hoped to start a clothing line, and we had talked about my investing in it.

As I was eating sushi at the synagogue, Tim was murdered. According to the police department's reconstruction of events, he was carjacked. The killer (or killers) drove away in Tim's souped-up 1994 Chevy Caprice, and Tim stumbled to a nearby Metro stop, where he died. He was 25 and a father.

Ten days later, I went to his funeral. Mourners wailed at his open casket. Speaker after speaker praised his kindness and asked God what was happening to so many young black men. Tim's murder was the 169th in D.C. in 2007, which gave it notoriety. The previous year, there had been 169 murders in the District, so each one after Tim's underscored the city's rising homicide rate. Police have yet to make an arrest or disclose the weapon that killed Tim, but odds are it was a handgun, the weapon of choice in American cities. (See where the 2008 presidential candidates stand on gun control.)

A few days after Tim was slain, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted District of Columbia v. Heller, a case about a law that was supposed to prevent murders like Tim's: D.C.'s ban on handguns, the country's strictest gun-control measure. Constitutional scholars, gun manufacturers, and gun-control advocates say this will be the most significant firearms case to come before the high court in almost 70 years. The court has assiduously avoided ruling on gun control since the 1930s, when it opened the door to regulation; suddenly it's deciding a case that could strike down many of the country's gun laws, affecting every firearm owner and manufacturer. How this case got to the Roberts court, and its coming as I dealt for the first time with a friend becoming a murder victim, made me ponder the prevalence of gun violence, the complexity of the issue's policy and politics, and why both sides, I think, miss the point.

It's easy for liberals to view the gun lobby as monolithic. In left-wing demonology, the National Rifle Association is regarded, along with Halliburton, as all-powerful. But the gun movement is more nuanced than that. In 2000, for instance, Smith & Wesson, the nation's largest gun manufacturer, broke with the rest of the gun industry and signed a settlement agreement with the Clinton administration in order to avoid lawsuits. The company, more than 150 years old, agreed to adopt numerous safety measures and change its sales practices. Smith & Wesson found itself vilified, subject to boycotts by weapons enthusiasts who believed it had sold out.

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