If "you bring a gun" to Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro warned during a Fox News interview on Monday, "you're going to jail." Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was touting her crime-fighting efforts, elaborating on her argument that "taking guns off the street" helps prevent homicides, carjackings, and robberies. But her threat provoked objections from Second Amendment advocates, who noted that the Constitution guarantees the right to carry guns for self-defense and that there is nothing necessarily illegal about doing so in the nation's capital.
The controversy over Pirro's remarks is especially notable because it comes shortly after President Donald Trump and other federal officials dismayed gun rights groups by suggesting that Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis protester who was fatally shot by immigration agents on January 24, was asking for trouble by legally carrying a concealed pistol. Both episodes illustrate the tension between Trump's avowed commitment to "protecting Second Amendment rights" and his frequently authoritarian tough-on-crime instincts.
