Our nation's capital

Kids in the Benning Terrace housing project have nothing to do during the summer besides stealing cars and joyriding. In a completely unrelated story, budget cuts will force layoffs and the elimination of athletic programs by the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Assocation. Also completely unrelated: the D.C. school board was forced to cancel pay raises for teachers and principals.

Also, D.C. had more new cases of the AIDS per capita than any other big U.S. city. Take that, Baltimore!

Meanwhile: murder, murder and more murder. There was this apparent murder-suicide in Northwest D.C. yesterday, and two other guys were shot in the head several times (one in Northeast, one in Southeast).

Fortunately, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, drawing from his inner-city street smarts, has the answer to solve all this gun violence: repealing the D.C. gun ban, including loosening the definition of "machine gun" to exclude semiautomatic weapons.

Hatch says: "Try to imagine the horror that [a] victim felt when he faced a gun-toting criminal and could not legally reach for a firearm to protect himself." (OK, I will: "Oh darn. This criminal's pointing a gun at my head. Too bad I can't legally carry a firearm, because I would. Then I could reach for it, and this guy would blow my head away. The horror... THE HORROR!!!")

I don't know if any of you saw this in the news, but we had this whole serial sniper deal about a year ago... random people were getting shot, kind of lasted a while, terrorized all of us for a good month or so, pretty much locked down the entire region, blah blah blah. I was eating at a restaurant a few blocks away from the Seven Corners shopping center where Linda Franklin was killed on October 14, and my wife and I had the privilege of spending the rest of the night sitting in our car, nervously waiting to get through a police road block.

You know what I wasn't thinking that night? "I really wish more people could legally own guns." I was thinking: "Let's drive to NRA headquarters and throw rocks at it."

Wow... depressing news today. I'm gonna need a fucking drink at lunchtime, I can tell right now.