A black woman from the District of Columbia who lost children to "gun violence" and who advocates for the victims of unsolved murders is calling on liberal Democrats to come to grips with the Second Amendment and vote for a bill before Congress that would give D.C. a vote in the House of Representatives at the cost of rescinding the city's stringent gun control laws.
"I want my vote to be counted. I want representation in Congress. And I also want the right to bear arms," Valencia Mohammed, director of Mothers of Unsolved Murders, is quoted in the March 21 Washington Post.
Mohammed went on to note the racist history of gun control against slaves and former slaves during Reconstruction before asserting she wants "all of those rights that they were denied."
But while it's great that the Post actually printed Mohammed's views, they were buried in paragraphs 24-27 of a 35-paragraph story on how a "Gun Law Compromise May Be Unavoidable to Pass Bill."
But let's think about this a bit. Mohammed is a mother of two sons whose lives were lost to criminals breaking D.C.'s gun ban, and she doesn't blame the weapon nor does she think her city's politicians are right to fight the Second Amendment tooth-and-nail with laws that restrict law-abiding citizens' ability to keep and bear arms.
Mohammed certainly represents a position -- albeit a minority view within the liberal District -- of Washington residents who want both a vote in Congress and the right to keep and bear arms. Mohammed falls outside the elitist liberal sentiments expressed by the Post editorial board and the District's left-wing liberal Democratic establishment in the city government.
But perhaps it's not surpising that the Post doesn't view Mohammed's unique angle as a story in its own right. After all, this is the same paper that practically considers domestic abuse victims' advocates and gun rights advocates to be mutually exclusive.
