For as long as I can remember, the left has been beating the drums for voting rights for residents of the District of Columbia. Translated into English, this means they want statehood for D.C. so there can be one or two extra Democrats in the House and (more importantly to the left) two extra Democrats in the Senate.
How about 2nd Amendment rights for D.C. residents? Because you have to purchase firearms from an FLFD who is licensed in the same state in which you live, D.C. residents can only buy from D.C.-based FLFDs. Or rather, I should not have pluralized that acronym, because there is only one FLFD in the whole District, and thanks to bureaucratic snafus with his lease (maybe not so accidental, IMHO), he is out of business for the time being, and with it is one of the ten items of the Bill of Rights in the District of Columbia.
A computer scientist named David Wheeler proposes that a district ceded to a Federal government from a state in order to be the national seat of government be treated as if it were still part of its state for the purposes of Federal elections. Originally, the Feds took territory from both sides of the Potomac River. Look at a road atlas’s D.C. inset, and you can see how Arlington, Virgina sorta “completes the square” with D.C. For some reason, the Feds didn’t think it would need any of the Virginia territory, so it quickly returned what it had taken from Virginia back to the state, and kept only the Maryland portion. Wheeler’s proposal would mean that D.C. residents would be counted and apportioned as Marylanders for House elections, the number of House seats MD would get would consider the D.C. population count plus its own state population, and Maryland’s state government would draw Congressional boundaries in accordance, D.C. residents would vote in Maryland U.S. Senate elections, and D.C. residents would vote for which slate of Maryland electors are sent to the Electoral College for Presidential elections. It would not mean that D.C. residents would vote for Maryland statewide offices (Governor, etc.) or its state legislative body. The beauty of this plan is that it gives the left what they apparently want, and when they start crowing against it for some contrived reason, then their hypocrisy will become plain even to the biggest moron — Maryland by itself is solid blue, so adding more blue votes from D.C. won’t change the balance of power in the Senate.
The same should be done with the ATF regulation that you have to buy from an FLFD within your state — D.C. residents should be treated as Maryland residents for this purpose. So they can purchase from an FLFD in rural Maryland if worse comes to worst.
