Washington, D.C. is famous for its insanely restrictive anti-gun laws. It has been illegal since 1976 to have an assembled and loaded firearm, even in your home, in D.C. Carrying a handgun for self-protection is against the law. For some reason, Democrats seem to be unable to explain the dramatic 72 percent rise in the D.C. homicide rate between 1976 and 2001, even as the national homicide rate plummeted 36 percent over the same period. Certainly Christopher Piper had no problem carrying a gun and using it to rape Senitt's female companion. Criminals, it seems, engage in crime. And law-abiding citizens pay the price.
The basis for every right in our Constitution is the right to self-preservation. John Locke, the founders' favorite non-Biblical philosopher, explained that if a government " endeavour[s] to grasp themselves an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty."
When a government seizes citizens' ability to protect themselves, that government becomes a usurper. It is for this reason that the Second Amendment guarantees both the individual right to self-defense and the communal right to fight any deprivation of the right to self-defense.
Would Alan Senitt have bought a gun for self-defense? The question is irrelevant in D.C.; Senitt had no choice in the matter. As it stands in D.C., only criminals have the right to choose. And the police can only respond to 911 calls.