Washington, D.C., has spent more than a century proving the same lesson the gun-control lobby refuses to learn: criminals, assassins, and would-be killers do not stop because a city council, legislature, or Congress passed another weapons law.
The latest reminder came at the Washington Hilton, the same hotel where John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
During the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25, 2026, a suspect allegedly tried to breach security while President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Cabinet officials, journalists, and other guests were inside. According to Reuters, the hotel said the event was operating under strict Secret Service protocols when the suspect bypassed a checkpoint on the floor above the dinner and opened fire with a shotgun. A Secret Service agent was wounded, reportedly protected by a ballistic vest, and the suspect was arrested before reaching the ballroom.
The gun control crowd responded the same way it always does. They demanded more restrictions on the people who did not commit the crime.
CNN’s Brian Stelter quickly used the attack to complain that there would not be any “substantive discussion about access to weapons.” The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms was not impressed.
“In an analysis, CNN’s Brian Stelter insinuated that nobody will consider tougher gun laws to prevent such an incident,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “He should have looked at the facts before going off half-cocked.”
Gottlieb pointed out that the suspect reportedly purchased the shotgun and a handgun from two different California gun stores. The Washington Post, citing an FBI affidavit, reported that the suspect legally purchased the firearms in California in 2023 and 2025.
“He had to pass two California background checks and endure two separate waiting periods,” Gottlieb said. “It is widely known California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, and the suspect was able to complete his legal purchases. Just what more does Stelter think could be done?”
California already has the background checks, waiting periods, gun restrictions, ammunition restrictions, and political class the anti-gun movement keeps trying to impose everywhere else. Washington, D.C., already has the registration laws, carry restrictions, and gun control bureaucracy they insist will make people safe.
Yet a determined attacker still allegedly traveled across the country with weapons, showed up at a protected political event, and tried to get past armed security in the nation’s capital.
Even Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche resisted the media’s rush to turn the attack into another legislative gun-control push. On CBS’s Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan pressed Blanche about whether the federal government should consider new rules after the suspect reportedly traveled from California to D.C. by train with multiple weapons.
“Look, this isn’t about, in my mind, changing the law or making the laws more restrictive around possession of firearms,” Blanche said.
When Brennan continued pressing the train-travel angle, Blanche again pushed back.
“I don’t think the narrative here is about changing laws or making our laws more restrictive,” he said. “This is about law enforcement who are doing their jobs and a suspect who tried to do something and failed miserably.”
Even after an armed attack at a high-profile political event in Washington, D.C., the acting attorney general was not willing to pretend another layer of gun laws was the obvious answer. Blanche said investigators were still working to determine how the suspect got the guns, whether he got them legally, and what additional federal charges may apply. But he made clear the immediate lesson was not “pass another gun law.” The immediate lesson was that Secret Service and law enforcement stopped the attack before the suspect got near the President or anyone else in the room.
Washington, D.C., already has the kind of gun laws they keep demanding for the rest of the country. D.C. law generally requires firearms to be registered. No person or organization in the District may possess or control a firearm without a valid registration certificate, subject to limited exceptions. D.C. law also makes it illegal to carry a pistol openly or concealed in the District without a D.C. carry license.
So what exactly did those laws stop?
They did not stop a determined attacker from showing up armed. They did not stop him from trying to get past security. They did not stop the first shot. What stopped him, according to the available reporting, was not a registration certificate, a carry ban, a waiting period, or a background check. It was armed people already on scene, ready to meet violent force with immediate force.
Gun control advocates treat the law-abiding citizen as the problem because the law-abiding citizen is the only person their laws can reliably control. The criminal who is willing to commit attempted murder, attack federal officers, or target a public event is not deterred by a paperwork requirement.
If the suspect purchased firearms legally in California, then he already passed through the very system gun-control activists claim will prevent these attacks.
California’s gun laws did not stop him. D.C.’s gun laws did not stop him. Armed, prepared people did.
Assassination attempts of U.S. Presidents in Washington, D.C. are unfortunately nothing new. Gun laws have always disarmed the law-abiding, while allowing violent criminals like John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, and John Hinckley Jr. to commit horrible crimes.
President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in 1865, inside the old City of Washington. The city had already enacted an 1858 ordinance prohibiting the concealed carrying of pistols, dirks, Bowie knives, and other dangerous weapons. Yet John Wilkes Booth still carried a pistol into the theater and murdered the President.
President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881 at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C. By then, the District had a 1871 law prohibiting the carrying of concealed deadly or dangerous weapons, including pistols, within the District. Yet Charles Guiteau still carried a revolver and shot the President.
President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 outside the Washington Hilton. By that time, D.C. had already adopted one of the harshest handgun-control schemes in the country. Yet John Hinckley Jr. still got a revolver to the scene and nearly killed a President.
Another interesting note is that the first two would also have been immune from magazine restrictions, semi-auto bans, and numerous other proposed gun control legislation. A person determined to commit violence will do so by any means necessary, gun control or no.
Now, in 2026, the Washington Hilton is again the scene of a violent attack in a city already buried under layers of gun laws.
The pattern is hard to miss.
Gun control does not disarm violent criminals. It disarms the peaceable. It creates soft targets. It tells ordinary citizens to obey, wait, hide, and hope someone else with a gun arrives in time.
Gottlieb put the focus where it belongs: on the attacker and on the hateful political climate surrounding the attempt.
“President Trump referred to the suspect as a ‘whack job’ and after reading his manifesto, that description seems appropriate,” Gottlieb observed. “That’s not to suggest this guy should be allowed to plead insanity, because his writings show he was in complete control of his faculties. He appears to be someone consumed by the vile, hate-filled rhetoric that’s been used against Donald Trump for more than ten years. This was not some spur-of-the-moment act.”
That point is worth sitting with. Tens of millions of American gun owners went through that weekend without shooting anyone, threatening anyone, or attempting to assassinate anyone. They did what they do every day: went to work, raised their families, carried responsibly where legal, and harmed no one.
“Tens of millions of gun owners—people whose rights too many in the media seem to disdain—didn’t hurt anyone Saturday night,” Gottlieb said. “We watched in shock with everyone else, as a California teacher, obviously overwhelmed by fanatical anti-Trump demagoguery, attempt to kill people. He will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but what about those who continue to spread their invective, hoping some harm comes to the president?”
That is the conversation media figures do not want to have. It is easier to blame guns than to examine a political culture that has spent years painting Donald Trump and his supporters as existential threats who must be stopped by any means necessary.
When the threat is seconds away, the answer is not another ordinance, another registration rule, another carry restriction, another waiting period, or another politician promising that the next law will work where the last hundred failed. The answer is immediate armed resistance from someone capable of stopping the threat before more innocent people are hurt.
At the Washington Hilton, that role fell to armed federal law enforcement. In the rest of America, it is often the armed citizen, the concealed carrier, the homeowner, the store clerk, the church volunteer, or the parent who refuses to be helpless.
That is why the Second Amendment matters. It is not a government-granted privilege for ideal conditions. It is a constitutional protection for the real world, where police cannot be everywhere, security checkpoints can be breached, and violent criminals do not care what the statute book says.
Proponents of gun control should stop hiding behind the claim that one more law, another infringement, or restriction is what they are looking for. They will not be satisfied until they have banned civilian ownership entirely.
The gun-control lobby will look at Washington, D.C., and demand more of what failed. Gun owners should look at the same facts and draw the obvious conclusion: laws that burden only the law-abiding do not stop evil men. Armed, prepared people do.
That was true in 1865. It was true in 1881. It was true in 1981. And it is still true today.
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About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor to AmmoLand News and serves as part of the editorial team responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.
