How the Gun Lobby Shot Down D.C.'s Congressional Vote

DC freelance reporter Byron Tau has an extensive story in the Washington City Paper on how the NRA subverted DC's attempts to get voting rights:

When Ilir Zherka took over as executive director of DC Vote in 2002, one of his friends jokingly told him, “Either you’re really smart because you have a job for life—you’re never going to accomplish this goal—or you’re really stupid because you think you can win.”

Perhaps both. But just this spring, he seemed close to proving his cynical compatriot wrong.

It was April 16, the anniversary of the 1862 day when Abraham Lincoln granted freedom to slaves in the District. And Zherka, a 44-year-old émigré from the former Yugoslavia, who equates the struggle for D.C. Congressional representation with the cause of Albanian freedom, was quick to draw a connection.

“We are not fully emancipated,” he announced to a group of 200-odd activists in the Capitol’s visitors’ center as they prepped for a flurry of last-minute lobbying. “We need to get the rights and privileges that all other Americans have.”

Demanding those rights and privileges has been rhetorical boilerplate for local pols going back decades. In the past few years, though, strategists like Zherka had quieted down about the city’s impossible dream—making itself a state, right alongside Alabama and Montana—and started pushing a humbler goal: winning D.C. a vote in the House of Representatives.

Click here to read more.