Will DC gun laws change?

Washington Post enters the fray again today:

[Congressman] Souder and his friends at the NRA prefer that people keep unlocked and loaded shotguns or rifles in their homes, so they added an amendment to the House version of the D.C. appropriations bill that prevents the city from enforcing its safe-storage requirements. The Senate didn't include such a reckless provision in its version of the bill. This week, a conference committee will meet to reconcile the bills' differences. If the Senate's conferees hold firm, the city will be spared the nightmare that is sure to come from loaded and unlocked guns falling into the hands of children.

That scary picture is borne out in a study published by the journal Pediatrics in September: "Approximately 90% of fatal firearm incidents involving children occur within the home, and according to a study of children and youth aged 0 to 14 years . . . 40% of firearm incidents involve a firearm stored in the room in which the shooting occurs."

Follow up: The CDC reports that for 2002 there were 26 accidental gun deaths for children under 10 and 60 for children under 15 in the US. My own work using the CDC numbers indicates that the vast majority of the children who died from accidental shots from 1995 to 2001 where killed by adult male criminals, who gun locks would not stop from firing their own guns.