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Page Number: 129

16 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

60%  of  robberies  and  26%  of  assaults.    Ibid.    “A  crime 
committed  with  a  pistol,”  the  committee  reported,  “is  7
times more likely to be lethal than a crime committed with
any  other  weapon.”  Id.,  at  25.  The  committee  further-
more  presented  statistics  regarding  the  availability  of 
handguns in the United States, ibid., and noted that they
had  “become  easy  for  juveniles  to  obtain,”  even  despite
then-current  District  laws  prohibiting  juveniles  from
possessing them, id., at 26. 

In  the  committee’s  view,  the  current  District  firearms 
laws  were  unable  “to  reduce  the  potentiality  for  gun-
related  violence,”  or  to  “cope  with  the  problems  of  gun 
control  in  the  District”  more  generally.    Ibid.  In  the  ab-
sence  of  adequate  federal  gun  legislation,  the  committee
concluded, it “becomes necessary for local governments to
act  to  protect  their  citizens,  and  certainly  the  District  of
Columbia  as  the  only  totally  urban  statelike  jurisdiction 
should  be  strong  in  its  approach.”    Id.,  at  27.    It  recom-
mended  that  the  Council  adopt  a  restriction  on  handgun
registration  to  reflect  “a  legislative  decision  that,  at  this
point  in  time  and  due  to  the  gun-control  tragedies  and 
horrors  enumerated  previously”  in  the  committee  report,
“pistols . . . are no longer justified in this jurisdiction.”  Id., 
at 31; see also ibid. (handgun restriction “denotes a policy
decision  that  handguns  . . .  have  no  legitimate  use  in  the
purely urban environment of the District”). 

The  District’s  special  focus  on  handguns  thus  reflects 
the  fact  that  the  committee  report  found  them  to  have  a
particularly  strong  link  to  undesirable  activities  in  the 
District’s  exclusively  urban  environment.    See  id.,  at  25– 
26.  The  District  did  not  seek  to  prohibit  possession  of 
other sorts of weapons deemed more suitable for an “urban 
area.”  See id., at 25.  Indeed, an original draft of the bill, 
and the original committee recommendations, had sought
to  prohibit  registration  of  shotguns  as  well  as  handguns,
but the Council as a whole decided to narrow the prohibi-