You Can't Get a Vote with a Gun

Senator Lamar S. JackassSmith had better hope the handgun ban stays in place, because apparently us DC citizens are so wacky in the head and galldarn stoopid that you never know what'll happen if you give us a gun.

"Wait a minute," you're thinking, "I'm a DC citizen, and I actually feel quite sane and articulate, with occasional flashes of eloquence. Where do you get the impression DC denizens are such rubes?"

I'm glad you asked. Read the comments section of any news outlet's coverage of the matter, and you will come across some charmingly quaint albeit unfounded accusations that commenters use to deny us our basic civil rights:

• We are illiterate, trigger happy criminals: "What good are voting rights if you cant read the ballot or get shot and killed before you reach 18??? Idiots." If you're so much more literate than us, why don't you try reading the 16th amendment? I know I live in DC and therefore have a hard time reading, so maybe you could tell me what a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the literacy tests on a nationwide basis means?
  
• We don't have to pay federal taxes (woohoo!): "These rights are reserved for *citizens*, those who pay federal taxes." And here I was, all stressed about April 15th. Now I can tell my employer to stop witholding the 17 or so percent of my paycheck that's going to pay my tax burden. Oh hellz yeah!
  
• From the WaPo:Wait just a minute. If we're such eejits, and therefore shouldn't vote, how come someone like this commenter gets a vote? "Im actually from Utah where well get another seat. Dear congress, dont do it. Theyre just going to expect Senate representation next. And worst of all youll give another seat to the Mormons, its just not worth it." You want one civil right, and then you'll ask for them all! God, it's just like when all those black people marched on Washington and demanded to be treated as more than second-class citizens. Remember how fucking annoying that was? Sometimes I miss Jim Crow.
  
• Giving us the vote would enable us to constantly harass Congress: "DC was made a non-state to ensure that congress would be able to operate with out fear of petty harassment from local government." Don't you think they'd get a lot less harassment for Eleanor Holmes Awesome if we got to vote?
• "DC was a made a DISTRICT not a STATE principally to ensure that it could not raise a militia that could physically threaten Congress or the White House." Wouldn't that be all the more reason NOT to force us to repeal our gun ban?
• If you don't want to own a gun, you are an un-American commie pinko: "Thems the breaks Dems !! You want to join America?? well we Americans like to own guns and carry them. If you do not like that, go join your uncle Fidel in Cuba."

Ugh, is anyone else in DC sick of having her character maligned based on ridiculously base stereotypes? Here's the piece de resistance: "Many people are ashamed that a sewer like DC is the nations capital. Decent people with a brain and a choice wouldnt be caught dead there. Let Prince Georges County annex it and move the capital somewhere else. Then, the DC residents all get a vote and we get a capital that you dont have to be afraid to walk around in."

I love it that these comments are coming in on the eve of the tourist season. Maybe our fair city is such a rat hole because of influx of fanny-packed tourists clogging the arteries of metro, picking the cherry blossoms for souvenirs, sticking their gum on the Vietnam Wall, and walking around the Holocaust Museum with their underoos hanging out, testing out the latest and greatest in ring tone technology.

Here's how I would resolve this mess:

• You are only allowed to visit our nation's capital if you support its citizens' constitutional rights. You want your pretty little cherry blossoms? Until you're willing to do so, the only pretty pink thing you're gonna be seeing is my ass when you kiss it.
  
• Until you start acting like the representations of democracy that we safeguard here in DC actually stand for something, you're not allowed to view them. This includes the buildings, monuments, Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and even the nudey pics of Antonella Barba in front of the WWII memorial.
  
• If you keep calling us commie pinkos for trying to participate in the democratic process, so help me God, we are not above restricting access to panda cam. We don't need you yelling "Go back to China, bitch!" at Butterstick.
  
• If the only way you'll concede us our constitutional right is by forcing us to have guns against our will, then we reserve the right to shoot you in the back when you stand on the left on the metro escalator.

So we're good. You let us participate in democracy, and we'll let you come see it in action and appreciate its foundations. And if you live in DC, come march for your most basic of rights on April 16th at 2:30. Try not to step in the ankle deep slurry of shitwater that apparently floods our streets.