AMERICA:FOUR HOURS after the United States Supreme Court overturned Washington DC's ban on handguns, police found a man shot dead in an alley off Xenia Street, in the southeast of the city.
The city's 86th murder so far this year, the shooting was so unremarkable that it merited just three lines on an inside page in the Washington Post's metro section.
Although Washington is no longer the murder capital of the US, (that title has passed to New Orleans), parts of the city are still plagued by gun violence, much of it linked to feuds between drug gangs.
Washington's persistently high crime rate receives little attention from national legislators or the media, partly because few opinion formers stray far from the relatively peaceful and mostly white northwest quadrant of the city.
Most victims of violent crime in the city are poor, black and young, and most murders happen in decaying neighbourhoods with failing schools and inadequate social services and few recreational facilities.
A spate of murders in the northeastern suburb of Trinidad prompted police to set up checkpoints earlier this month to screen motorists coming in and out of the neighbourhood.
For almost a week, police asked motorists why they were entering Trinidad and those without a "legitimate" reason were turned away.
Nobody was shot in Trinidad while the checkpoints were operating but the experiment had little impact on crime throughout the city, as shootings continued in other neighbourhoods.
The District of Columbia's gun ban, the toughest in the country, was passed in June 1976 in response to a severe crime wave. It forbids the city's residents, with few exceptions, from registering handguns and keeping them in the city. It also requires legal firearms such as shotguns and rifles to be stored disassembled or bound with trigger locks.
In February 2003, special police officer Dick Anthony Heller and five other residents sued the city, hoping to win the right to keep handguns and an assembled shotgun in their homes for self-defence. Heller lost in the district court but won in the appeals court, a ruling the supreme court upheld this week.
Although Washington's mayor Adrian Fenty and police chief Cathy Lanier have warned that lifting the handgun ban will increase gun violence, many residents of the city's more violent districts believe things can hardly get any worse. Many parents in places like Trinidad keep their children indoors as much as possible in case they are hit by a stray bullet, while others despair of keeping their teenage sons away from the gang culture.
Despite the gun ban, it has never been difficult to acquire a weapon in Washington, partly because gun laws in neighbouring Virginia are so liberal. Criminals pay people who have no prior convictions to make "straw purchases" in gun shops or at firearms fairs where after a quick background check, they can walk out with anything from a semi-automatic pistol to an assault rifle.
Community activists have long complained that Washington police enforced the gun ban unevenly, coming down hard on those who possess firearms, but taking little action against those who sell them. Groups working with at-risk youth fear that once guns go on sale in Washington, young people short of cash will be tempted to buy and sell them.
Fenty has promised to introduce the most restrictive gun laws this week's court ruling will allow, including a requirement to register all legally held firearms.
The mayor points out that the supreme court's ruling does not affect the District of Columbia's ban on machine guns, which under DC law includes any gun "which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily converted or restored to shoot semi-automatically, more than 12 shots without manual reloading". This means that most semi-automatic handguns will remain banned.
In cities like Washington and Chicago, which is also plagued by gun crime, local politicians fear a wave of lawsuits by gun rights advocates to remove restrictions, a danger Justice Stephen Breyer highlighted in his dissenting opinion.
"Litigation over the course of many years, or the mere spectre of such litigation, threatens to leave cities without effective protection against gun violence and accidents during that time," he wrote.
