We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jishinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
and of course, if you want to support our work, make sure
to head over to the Federalist dot com and try out the premium version of
our website as well. Today we're joined by Sophie Hamilton. She works in
health studies for a DC libertarian think tank. She's also a Young Voices fellow
and contributor and man. Sophie has an interesting story to tell us today.
So Sophie, welcome to Federalist Radio Hour. Thank you so much for having
me on. Emily, I'm excited to be here. Before we dive into
your story, I actually just want to see if you can tell us a
little bit about yourself. How it is that you ended up working on health
policy here in d C. Where you're from. Catch us up on you
a little bit. Yeah, So, I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I
went to the University of Miami for undergrad and then after graduation I moved up
to DC and I've been here for about two years. I've been doing policy
work a think tank. I started off doing housing and welfare, and now
I'm in healthcare, mostly focusing on drug policy. And I've also been with
Young Voices since January, where I've been doing some freelance writing, mainly focusing
on housing, welfare and health policy studies. Amazing, and so people can
follow your work at Sophie Hamilton on Twitter at Sofie Hamilton. People can pick
up on the stuff that you're doing over there. But actually, for the
purposes of this discussion, I'm not remotely surprised to learn that you're from Florida,
because, in fact, what you are going to tell us about is
this amazing story about how you sort of pushed the government here in the district
of Columbia where I've lived for twelve, twelve or thirteen years now, and
this has actually always been something that's been kind of a bugaboo, and every
conservative woman who lives in DC knows about this. You actually helped to change
something. Sophy. Could you start just by telling us how you ended up
writing this piece in the Washington Examiner on pepper spray and then take us through
what happened after you wrote it. Yeah, So I think, like any
woman living in a city, or really any woman anywhere, I carry pepper
spray. I keep it on my keychain. It's with me anywhere that I
go. It's just a little tool that I can keep with myself, just
for safety, for anything, if anything bad happens, especially living in a
city. I think it's very important. Sadly, I had gone to some
sort of venue I think it was a concert, and I got my peppers
taken away by the security. There no problem. Next morning, I just
went on Amazon to reorder myself one and I got an error code and it
was saying that it wasn't deliverable to my address, my DC apartment address.
I thought that was weird, so I started plugging in other addresses. I
put it to my parents' house in Florida. I put it at my friend's
house in Virginia, and it was going to send to those addresses. So
I thought, maybe there's something going on here legally where it's not allowed to
be sent to DC. Maybe it's illegal in DC. So I started doing
some digging through the DC code, through the laws, and I found that
it's totally legal to own pepper Spray to use pepper spray for self defense in
Washington, d C. So I thought that was weird, and it wasn't
just Amazon that was preventing me from ordering this. There was several other huge
pepper spray retailers online that were refusing to send it to my DC the address.
So I tried to no avail to reach out to those, to those
online retailers, Amazon saber bling, sting anyone said I could find that wouldn't
send it, and I heard nothing back. So I then took my next
course of action, which was to write a seething online article and did a
Twitter blitz about this and put out my thoughts about why I thought it was
ridiculous that I couldn't buy pepper spray and Washington, DC. And so so
this is July. By the way, I have the article in front of
you. It's headline why won't retailers mail pepper spray to residents of crime?
Written DC and of course on some crimes in particular, we're experiencing record levels
of crime here in DC. In fact, we'll to actually talk about that
in just a second. So this is late July, and that's the article
you're talking about. It was in the Washington Examiner, right, yes,
correct, amazing, Okay, so it take us from there then. Yeah,
so I published this article in the Washington Examiner. I had a lot
of women, a lot of friends, coworkers, just random people on Twitter
responding to me that they were angry about this too, that they couldn't figure
out how to buy pepper spray, that they were then sending it to their
friends in the neighboring Arlington, Virginia, Maryland so they could drive it over
the border. But I didn't hear anything back from anyone. I had reached
out to people in the DC Council. They had confirmed with me that it's
totally legal to have I never heard anything. It wasn't until last week that
I had opened up Twitter and I saw a tweet tagging me from Congress or
from council member Christina Henderson, noting that she had passed emergency legislation to clarify
to online retailers that is totally legal to send pepper spray to Washingtonians. I
mean, it's just you've done the unthinkable again. This is something, as
you mentioned, it's funny to me because it's something that's kind of been It's
loomed over like womanhood in Washington, DC for years because it's always just been
something everyone just knew. You weren't allowed to have pepper spray here, and
this is I feel like this is a huge step. What was your reaction
when you saw that. I was so surprised, so happy. I definitely
shed a couple happy tears after that. I wasn't told by council Member Henderson's
office that they were even aware of my article that this was going on,
but I was really happy that that change was being made. Funnily enough,
that same day before I got that news, one of my female coworkers came
up to me and asked if I could help her get pepper spray because she
knew about the article. She knew that I carried it, and I had
figured that out with her. I was going to send it to a friend's
address, and then I saw that news. So it was really great that
a council member was listening to one of her constituents in that they're actually doing
some good. I think we like to talk negatively about the local DC government,
about Congress and how they handle the district, but this was a very
good piece of legislation that they passed, and it was exciting as someone that
works in policy to know that my thoughts matter, that I'm being listened to,
and I'm not just talking to a brick wall all day, as I
often and many of my co workers often. Feel like. There are a
couple of layers that I really love about this story, and let me just
start with one. Christina Henderson is, as you mentioned, the councilwoman at
large who tweeted again, if I were you, I mean I my mind
would just be blown away by this November seventh, at five twenty three pm.
She posts earlier earlier this summer and tags you. Sophie hamill And wrote
a piece in DC Examiner Washington Examiner about her challenges acquiring pepper spray for self
defense purposes in DC. Although it's legal to possess, online retailers were not
selling or delivering those items to d C addresses. We followed up with Amazon,
the interpreted the DC Code to suggest that pepper spray could only be sold
by a licensed dealer and could not confirm that their many independent sellers were licensed.
I drafted emergency legislation to clarify that pepper spray can be sold and delivered.
It passed today twelve to one. Okay, so twelve to one,
and from Christina Henderson, who, according to her biography, actually worked for
Chuck Schumer. At one point she was a legislative aid to Chuck Schumer.
The DC's City council Leans left no question about it, And Sophie, I
wonder if you think that's why for years this kind of just went untouched,
like people assumed there was basically nothing to be done about it. You know,
even if people are interpreting the statute incorrectly, who's going to you know,
take that risk in such a blue city. That strikes me as actually
one of the most interesting parts of this story. Yeah, you know,
I'm really unsure why nothing was ever done to rectify this. I think there
people just weren't talking and they weren't telling the government that there was this issue
going on. I will say, back in twenty seventeen, the DC government
made it a bit easier to get pepper spray. You used to even though
it was legal back then, you used to have to go to your local
police officer and register it, which is ridiculous. It's pepper spray. Why
do you have to register pepper spray. Pretty soon you're gonna have to actually
register pepper I know. So it's like it just at least they got rid
of that. So I'm not sure how Amazon had come to this conclusion,
but I do think that, you know, if they maybe some people were
thinking, if they made it easier to get pepper spray, then what would
be the next self defense tool that's going to be easier to get? Is
our stunt gun's going to easier to get or more powerful, and then it
leads to guns. So you just don't know what connection they were making there,
and I'm really unsure why no one had made any move on this sooner.
Yeah, it does seem somewhat baffling. And that's the next part that
I want to ask you about. This is actually in the legislation that the
council passed on an emergency basis, and this is surrounding at Mayor Bowser this
week. You know, if folks don't necessarily if if folks are outside DC
and don't necessarily care so much about everything that happens on a local level,
DC is experiencing when a lot of major cities are experiencing, and then what
a lot of the people who sort of live in the suburbs and have the
ripple effects where they, you know, don't want to park downtown and take
their kids to a museum or anything like that. It's a lot of the
same. And this is from the bill. Quote from the bill. As
of November six, twenty twenty three, violent crime is forty percent higher than
it was at the same date last year. The majority of the increase is
due to robberies increasing by sixty nine percent and homicides rising by thirty three percent.
In this environment, district residents need easy and reliable access to tools that
decrease their vulnerability and empower them to address threats to their fifty eight personal safety.
Again, that is straight up from the legislation. And so Sophie,
and by the way, if I've said Sophia, that's because Sophie goes by
both Sophia and Sophia, which is super helpful because I can't get it wrong
whichever one I use. But Sophie, if is that an example maybe of
the situation having to get worse before it could get better, That things just
got so bad here in the district that even people who had never thought about
this before were sort of forced to confront the issue of self defense. I
think that's exactly what it is. And I had made that point in my
article that violent crime has risen year over year in DC, and even though
I feel safe most of the time that I'm walking around the streets of DC
and living here, I'm still aware of the fact that robberies are rising,
gun violence is rising, and so I just I need to take care of
myself. My friends need to take care of themselves. So we all had
slowly been getting access to these different self defense tools, and I think that
was really what that line in the article is really what pushed the council member
to listen. Because everyone's talking about the crime rate raising. Everyone is talking
about that throughout the nation. About DC. It's somewhat becoming a laughing stock.
I see memes about it all over Instagram and Twitter, which is sad.
But I think that was a good turning point for them, and you
know that this is an easy piece of legislation that they can get past to
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Yeah, I think that's really interesting because again, like I've lived here since
the Obama years, and it's never felt quite like it. It's felt like
in the last couple of years, and you know, it's just I wonder
if you could talk a little bit more about being a woman in a major
city where violent crime is rising and having this thought, you know, I
need to replenish my pepper spray supply because it got taken away at a concert.
You know, even just on that basic level, because I think it
gets taken for granted. Up you've taken for granted in conservative circles. We're
sort of all on the same page, and in fact, wish that it
was wish perhaps it was easier to conceal carry in DC. It's not that
easy, but uh, you know, we wish maybe it was easier to
equip ourselves with other self defense methods and all of that. So it's almost
taken for granted that if you were having this conversation with somebody on the left,
you there is something psychologically important about having something that you can carry in
your bag or in your pocket to defend yourself. Can you just talk a
little bit more about that. Yeah, So I carry my boover's right on
my keychain, so it's with me at all times. Though it is a
bit frustrating because you most bars, clubs, concert venues, even the museums
in DC, you can't carry the pepper spray into so that's how a lot
of people lose theirs, or you just have to leave it at home,
and those a lot of those are the places that you're going at night.
So that's something frustrating. And I hopefully will be able to write on that
one soon and get those rules change. So that's not legislation. But yeah,
as a woman, really, as anyone living in DC, it's so
important that I carry something on me to protect myself personally, I really don't
want to carry a gun. It's like you said, it's difficult to get
a concealed carry and that's just not something that I want to go through totally,
totally, for it's just I don't I wouldn't be the best person to
have a gun. So pepper spray seems like a good option for me and
for a lot of my friends, a lot of the women that I've talked
to. I, for example, I have a small dog. I have
to take her out every night, especially now as it's getting darker earlier.
I'm always walking her around at night, and sometimes I'm not in the best
area. Yeah, so I'm being cognizant of my surroundings. I'm being vigilant.
I'm making sure I'm seeing who's walking around me. I'm looking around,
but I still have to pay attention to my dog. So if something,
if someone comes up and tries to accost me, at least I have pepper
spray, so we can go. I can spray them and we can run
away. So and then you don't have the whole conscious of I don't want
to shoot someone. I really don't want to have to deal with that.
So it just it's a much easier thing to hold on to. But yeah,
it's just that's something that you have to think about as a woman.
I like that you have that example of your dog, because you know,
it's really easy, especially for people who maybe don't live in cities, never
have lived in cities, or have lived in you very very safe cities,
to say, for example, you don't go out at night. Be smart,
you know, don't do X, Y and Z. But there are
certain things that sometimes you know it's dark out and you need to walk out
to the grocery store. There are certain things that you absolutely can't get around
if you do live city. Walking your dog is a really good example.
Maybe you had to work late to make money to pay your rent, maybe
you work a third shift. All of these different problems are unavoidable for some
people. And having that ability, knowing that you'd have that ability if someone
were to again, we're talking about a city where homicides are up thirty three
percent and robbery is up sixty nine percent. First of all, people who
want to commit crimes should know that a lot of young women are going to
have pepper spray on their keychains. I mean that in and of itself seems
to me such an important part of this too. Exactly. You know,
my mom always says to me not to take the Metro after dark. Well,
it gets dark at four thirty, and I need to come home after
work, so I don't think it would be much safer if I'm walking forty
five minutes versus taking the metro. So some of these things are unavoidable,
and I don't think we should go and do any sort of victim blaming of
why are you outside at night? Because I live in a city and I
have to be I have to be an adult and I have to do these
things, and people should know that women are going to protect themselves. But
I think this also goes past just a women's issue. Robberies are typically,
at least in DC, they're targeted towards men. I've talked to so many
men that live in my apartment building that have told me that they've been robbed
right on the corner where we live, that they've been robbed at gunpoint,
and so they should be carrying pepper spray, they should have some sort of
weapon on them as well. This goes across all genders and it's honestly terrifying,
But you can't live in that fear. So you have to find a
way that you can keep yourself safe and you can have that peace of mind
as well. Yeah, and another kind of layer of the story that I
really like is going to get into maybe a behind the curtain media story.
But you mentioned that you didn't even know this was on Christina henderson since radar
or anybody in DC government's radar. And that's so interesting to me as somebody
who works in media, because one of the first things that I learned,
somebody here at Federalist HQ just is sneezing up the storm. It's which I
actually really enjoy in the background. It's a it's in media. You One
of the first things I learned was that you you don't quite understand how powerful
just an op ed in the Washington Examiner or a tweet can be until you
kind of get involved and start doing it. And I wanted to ask you,
Sophie, about that aspect of all of this. If when you reflect
on, you know, publishing this piece back in July and then come November
being surprised with like an actual moment that must have felt very empowering, seeing
actual change happen in your city on this scale. Were you surprised to find
that somebody had read this and had worked on it and all all the while
you sort of didn't even know. You just had maybe felt like you dropped
your thoughts, you dropped your argument out there and people read it. But
that was that. Yeah. I think surprised is an understatement. Anytime someone
comments at work or one of my friends that they've read my work or they
saw out on like goo Google search, on Twitter, I'm surprised. So
to see that a member of the DC government was reading it and was aware
of this happening was mind blowing to me. I've been in policy for a
little over three years now, and I've been writing and publishing op eds for
the past year, and this is the first thing that I can say that
is directly attributed to me in my influence, and that's really exciting. As
someone that works in policy, you're often just you're talking to a wall,
it feels like, or you're just talking to people that agree with you,
and you're not really seeing change being made, or the change being made is
really really slow going. So seeing that this was able to happen and she
was able to introduce that legislation and then in the next day or two it
passed was so amazing to me and was really motivating me. I think,
as most people in policy feel sometimes you just you feel like, what are
you doing? What are we doing here? We're not really getting work done.
Maybe my time would be better spent in media or in working on the
hill where I can get actual things past. So it was really exciting to
see that I was being listened to in that my opinions mattered and they were
being heard. Yeah, And the reason I bring that up is actually just
because it's amazing a how closely people in public policy and in business track what
people say on social media and actually in the media. They all have Google
alerts for these types of things, and it's just people would be surprised at
you know, you can write something and that's not this is not what happened
in this case. But you could write something on a random blog or from
an anonymous Twitter account and it could cause an earthquake inside an ad agency,
or inside a c suite, or inside of a conference room at the DCCD
Council something like that, because people do pay really, really close attention,
which I think is almost like it's empowering in this time when things feel so
overwhelming and daunting and people feel like they lack agency in the face of you
know, all of these big, big challenges, big companies, you know,
big problems. It just it seems so tough. But they pay really
really close attention to what people say in the present and social media. So
I mean, Sophie like part of that is just it's it's pretty impressive that
you wrote a good enough argument, And that's my question is also, how
do you think you were persuasive? You know there is there an argument you
think that really it got the attention and effectively brought someone to this cause who
maybe has a background on the left. Yeah, so I think this saw
success because I was really passionate about it. It was something that had personally
affected me. I knew it was affecting all of my friends, all of
my coworkers, really any woman living in d C. So I was able
to write a pretty passionate argument, and I think connecting in the crime data
there was really helpful because it's not showing that this is there's no reason to
be making this emergency legislation. There's a real reason to be putting our efforts
into making it easier to get self defense tools, and it's because we feel
unsafe and there's documented evidence is why we should feel unsafe and getting that national
attention I think really helped push this forward because, like you said, I
published this back in July, and now we're seeing progress in November, and
policy wise, that's pretty quick to get something done, but I would have
liked to see this happen in July. But yeah, I really think that
showing that there's a reason to be a bit afraid, though I don't think
we should be living our lives in fear, really helped push this forward because
this is a simple tool that everyone should have, at least every woman should
be carrying on them that lives in a city, And there was no reason
that I shouldn't be able to get my hands on this, especially if it's
legal. Retailers should not be the ones telling me what I can and cannot
buy. If anything, that's bad business on their parts. So I'm glad
that they were able to make this clarification, So hopefully retailers get in line
and understand that we should be able to purchase this as well. Are there
any big picture lessons or anything you kind of take away from this experience?
Obviously we've talked about, you know, being empowering and surprising and just a
great step for women and men in the district and hopefully in other cities where
this may be a problem as well. I mean that can be a model
a piece of legislation like this if you're having if Amazon and other retailers are
having similar interpretation problems, this can be maybe a model for people in other
cities to follow. But what did this? Did this change your outlook on
politics? Does this sort of make you more optimistic as you kind of fairly
earlier in your career, you know, as you approach you know some of
these big challenges going forward. I think the biggest lesson here was if you
feel passionately about something, you should speak up. I after I had published
or posted this on the news of the legislation on Twitter, on my Instagram,
I had so many of my friends that live here message me and go,
oh, get it, like, thank you so much for doing this.
I had friends in New York City letting me know that it's even more
difficult for them to get it because it's totally illegal there. I think,
so, I think this is really showing that this is not just a DC
problem, that this is affecting other cities. And I think this once you
get this momentum and you get this model legislation. As you said, you
can go to different cities and get it pasted. And so once you have
something that you feel passionately about it, run with it because your voice matters,
and your representatives are there to represent you and you should be speaking with
them. That's such a great message. And finally, just as you know,
again we've been talking about the rise in crime, and actually we cover
that a lot on the show, not just in DC, but in other
cities. And you know, this is something that we've seen deep blue cities
with kind of establishment democrat mayors Amuriel Bowser and Eric Adams or even a governor
like Gavin Newsom is dealing with this. Actually, as we talk in San
Francisco right now with the visit a Chin Pang this week, this is something
that people London breed in San Francisco have really had to grapple with. And
I want to just ask one of these big questions, Sophie while we're at
it. As you think about this, and as you think about you know,
why it is you feel the need to defend yourself in the city amidst
this rising crime. I suspect you're somebody who would probably want pepper spray even
if crime wasn't quite at this level. But when you think about where these
cities are are headed, why do you think it is? It doesn't have
anything to do with the post COVID environment or the climate of you know,
maybe societal breakdown. What do you how are you thinking about this as somebody
who has put some thought into it and is living the situation right now.
Yeah, that's a that's a tough question. It's definitely a lot of issues
going on. So DC in particular, we're seeing a lot of turnover with
our police. They're not able to keep the workforce. They're recruiting people slower
than they're able to Then they're recruiting people slower than they're leaving, so they're
having a dwindling police force, and they're not really going after actual criminals.
These people are getting let out, so we're having criminals on the streets that
are going after they're they're having all of this gun violence. We're seeing children
in DC, teenagers as young as thirteen, committing crimes and promoting this violence.
But even in other cities besides DC, we're seeing where they were not
being tough on crime, Like in San Francisco. Mayor London, Breed is
now kind of turning on the points that she was making. She's flipping because
she's going to be up reelection soon and her soft on crime policies are not
working out for her. They're increasing homelessness, they're increasing violent crime, and
so now she's becoming a bit more tough. And so I think that is
the pattern that we're going to be seeing, is that these cities are going
to be stricter, and so I think that's going to have some ramifications for
criminal justice issues, but I think the safety of individuals and being able to
live in a city and have that peace of mind is of the most important
part of this conversation. So hopefully the mayors of these different liberal cities will
take notice and understand that even though they were trying to do maybe a virtuous
thing with these criminal justice reforms, that it's not turning out for the better,
and that their cities are not turning out better. So maybe we'll see
some some better in the next couple of years, but I think I'm more
hopeful than most. Yeah, I know, you raise it actually a good
point, and you know, it makes me think that these last couple of
years have set the cause of criminal justice reform back a really long way.
And you know, the early twenty tens, was it the New York Times
or Time magazines sort of declared the libertarian moment and Brand Paul was talking a
lot about this stuff. The Trump administration in the First Step Act, a
lot of people are in the criminal justice reform space felt like there's the wind
was at their back and there was a lot of momentum. And as much
as I may disagree with different proposals or whatever, it is, obviously there's
a balance that needs to be struck. And I think there are some really
worthy causes within the criminal justice reform movement. And my gosh, this the
years since COVID and the kind of radicalism and incompetence that's been shown by some
Democratic mayors, I don't think the left has quite realized reckoned with the reality
that's really probably set some of these causes back quite a bit, because these
these rises in crime are very steep and won't scar a lot of people for
years to come. And I think COVID definitely had an impact on it.
You know, the development stunting for children, We're seeing a lot, a
huge rise in children committing crimes in DC. So there's I have no understanding
of how that's had an impact on it, and I don't think anyone has
the data there, But I really do think this has affected the criminal justice
advocacy that we've that we really saw start starting in twenty twenty after the George
Floyd murder. So and it's sad that that is now stunting it because these
are somewhat unrelated. By these just soft on crime policies are not helping,
and they're really just affecting good citizens and keeping them from living their lives.
Yeah, another point worth remembering. We don't even think about all of the
kids that are roped into crimes or who are actually victims of not having a
two parent household, or victims of the culture in so many ways, which
doesn't excuse any of their culpability. And we are talking, as you mentioned
about murders in some cases, we're talking about violent robberies and other cases.
But these are lives that are ruined down the line, and that's victims first
and foremost. But oh my gosh, the amount of children that are being
swept up into this needlessly because so many of our social ties were frayed during
COVID because schools were closed and anti social behavior was harder to correct and notice.
It is a real tragedy and it's going to be with us for years
to come. I completely agree. It's really sad when the headlines are about
a thirteen year old committing a murder, fourteen year old, fifteen year old
robbed carjackings. I don't They've tried to put curfews in for the youth in
DC, and I just don't see that being enforced. I can look outside
out out of my own window, and I see them running rampant, and
so I think there really needs to be an increase in community programs and helping
out these families. But that's not going to be a band aid solution,
and that's going to take a lot of time to reverse the damage that's been
done well. Sophie Hamilton is a fellow and a contributor over at Young Voices.
You can follow her on Twitter at Sophie Hamilton. That's Sophie with an
f Sophie, thank you for joining us, Thank you so much for having
me on Emily, of course, and congratulations. I mean this is just
fantastic. And I say that from one woman in DC to another. Thank
you. I appreciate it, and I'm really still thankful for a council member,
Christina Henderson, for listening and also for calling me out for my efforts.
I appreciate that so much. Yeah, that's it. That is a
classy move, just a class act and on the right side of this one.
So we really appreciate it. And you have been listening to another edition
of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Kashinski, culture editor here at The
Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray. You got me right, you