Shockingly, Washington, DC does not look like this.

Residents of Washington, DC will continue to be denied Congressional representation because, once again, a bunch of Congresspeople who aren’t from cities want to use voting as an excuse to force the District to drastically weaken its gun laws.

In some places of the country carrying a gun makes sense. If you live an hour from the nearest police station, get the protein for many meals from animals you’ve killed yourself, or have certain jobs, guns are sensible tools to have around. However, urban centers like the District of Columbia are not like that. In Washington the police are always nearby, most people would rather give up their wallet to a mugger than risk dying in a gun fight, and in any event it’s too crowded to use a gun safely without worrying about hitting someone innocent.

Most city residents conclude quite sensibly that the city is better off with fewer guns, for the same reasons that most rural residents conclude quite sensibly that their communities are better off with more guns: Different policies are appropriate in different places.

Wouldn’t it be great if elected officials from both parties accepted that cities and rural areas have different problems with different solutions, rather than trying to force their own local politics onto places that are fundamentally different? Maybe that’s too much to ask.