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The District of Columbia established a special program to allow for inspections by third-party agencies in lieu of DCRA (Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs) inspectors.The DCRA is where you go to get a Certificate of Occupancy, building permits, business license, etc. https://dcra.dc.gov/You can use one of the approved companies on the linked site in lieu of having the district performing inspections https://eservices.dcra.dc.gov/DocumentManagementSystem/Home/retrieve?id=DC%20Approved%20Third%20Party%20Agencies.pdfInstead of waiting in a lengthy queue at the DCRA, owners can hire the approved third parties to perform plan reviews. Ideally, an approved permit would be issued shortly after the plans are reviewed and approved by the DCRA-certified reviewers.However, a study done a few years ago by the Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects showed 60% of respondents reported that they have not used the Third-Party Review Program. Among the 40% that have used Third-Party Review Program, 68% reported no improvements in permit processing times.

Is there any widely cited scientific study, published in a first-rate, peer-reviewed journal, linking gun ownership in the general population with reduction of crime rates?You’re probably looking for Gary Kleck. His “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun” is prominent and may be what you are looking for. It’s not certain that gun ownership can be linked with reduction in crime, but it’s pretty illogical to blame legal gun owners on the activity of criminals. Guns are all over Phoenix, Arizona, which has a crime rate similar to San Diego, California, which has exactly the same gun laws as Compton, California. Something is causing crime in Compton. But is it legal gun ownership?Scholarship of guns and crime tilted heavily toward advocacy research, but things started to change late in the last century. The first crack in the wall is the 1978 Under the Gun by James Wright, Peter Rossi, and Kathleen Daly. From the introduction:In 1978, the Social and Demographic Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, received a grant from the National Institute of Justice to undertake a comprehensive review of the literature on weapons, crime, and violence in the United States. The purpose of the project is best described as a "sifting and winnowing" of the claims and counterclaims from both sides of the Great American Gun War — the perennial struggle in American political life over what to do, if anything, about guns, about violence, and about crime. The review and analysis of the available studies consumed the better part of three years; the results of this work are contained in this volume.The intention of any review is to take stock of the available fund of knowledge in some topical area. Under the Gun is no different: our goal has been to glean from the volumes of previous studies those facts that, in our view, seem firmly and certainly established; those hypotheses that seem adequately supported by, or at least approximately consistent with, the best available research evidence; and those areas or topics about which, it seems, we need to know a lot more than we do. One of our major conclusions can be stated in advance: despite the large number of studies that have been done, many critically important questions have not been adequately researched, and some of them have not been examined at all.Much of the available research in the area of weapons and crime has been done by advocates for one or another policy position. As a consequence, the manifest intent of many "studies" is to persuade rather than to inform. We have tried to approach the topic from a purely agnostic point of view, treating as an open question what policies should be enacted with regard to gun, or crime, control. Thus, we have tried to judge each study on its own merits, on the basis of the routine standards normally applied to social-scientific research, and not on the basis of how effectively it argues for a particular policy direction. It would, of course, be presumptuous to claim that we have set aside all our own biases in conducting this study. Whether or not our treatment is fair and objective is clearly something for the reader, and not us, to decide.The original study was followed by another Justice Department grant that funded a wide-ranging survey of incarcerated criminals who had actually used guns in crimes — in other words, source experts. That study was published as Armed and Considered Dangerous.Both studies broke new ground. Under the Gun in particular was, according to the authors, originally intended to catalog the existing research and then pick the type of gun control that worked best. Both authors were rather conventional Ivy League academes from UMass at Amherst. As they state in the conclusion to the first study:The progressive's indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that both the senior authors of this study once shared. This indictment includes the following particulars: (1) Guns are involved in an astonishing number of crimes in this country. (2) In other countries with stricter firearms laws and fewer guns in private hands, gun crime is rare. (3) Most of the firearms involved in crime are cheap Saturday Night Specials, for which no legitimate use or need exists. (4) Many families acquire such a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves; eventually they end up shooting one another. (5) If there were fewer guns around, there would obviously be less crime. (6) Most of the public also believes this and has favored stricter gun control laws for as long as anyone has asked the question. (7) Only the gun lobby prevents us from embarking on the road to a safer and more civilized society.The more deeply we have explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become.Neither study reaches exactly the conclusion the question is looking for, but these are the papers that formed the first cracks in the dam. For more about both studies, see Kevin Baker's answer to Were Wright and Rossi really pro gun control prior to their study? from which I lifted the above quote.

I recently wrote on article on exactly this subject, wherein I cite and hyperlink 50+ relevant sources, many of which are peer-reviewed academic articles. Instead of just providing a laundry list of academic articles and other sources, it’s probably easiest to consult these sources in the context of my article, the rights to which I own exclusively and I am providing below for Quora readers.…As confirmed COVID-19 cases now exceed 3 million globally, a plethora of highly politicized and questionable theories on the viral origin of this global pandemic have emerged. While some of these ideas can be dismissed as “conspiracy theories,” the possibility of a lab accident in Wuhan is surprisingly consistent with my own extensive examination of sources ranging from peer-reviewed academic research to the World Health Organization’s own accounts of prior lab accidents in China involving SARS.There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 (aka “the COVID-19 virus”), the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, emerged naturally and not as a result of human manipulation. Theories of genetically engineered coronaviruses at bioweapons labs in Wuhan entirely lack evidence and supporting data.Over the last two decades, infectious disease researchers have identified hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses, some of which were clearly already “poised for human emergence,” borrowing language from US-based scientists in a 2016 paper they published on coronaviruses identified in bats found in Southern China. It turns out that many major epidemics, including SARS and Ebola, can be linked to bat-borne viruses found in Southern China.The question was not IF we would experience a major SARS-like coronavirus pandemic or even WHERE this pandemic would likely originate (Southern China). It was simply a question of WHEN.What is so surprising about the current COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, is where the outbreak initially occurred: Central China (where Wuhan is located) and NOT Southern China, as researchers would have expected. This oddity also perplexed one of the world’s leading coronavirus researchers: Prof. Zhengli SHI of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a recent interview with Scientific American Prof. Zhengli SHI explained, “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” as her research had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of China, like Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan, had the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping from animals, especially bats, to humans.CHINESE HORSESHOE BATS AND THEIR CONNECTION TO THE COVID-19 VIRUSThere is overwhelming evidence suggesting that the COVID-19 virus originated in bats found in Southern China. In an article that was rapidly published by Professor Zhengli SHI of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on January 23, 2020 Professor SHI demonstrated that the COVID-19 virus was a 96.2% match with a bat coronavirus named BatCoV RaTG1, which SHI’s own team had sampled, isolated, identified and been studying at their Wuhan-based institute. Professor SHI and her team had originally found this particular bat coronavirus within a population of intermediate horseshoe bats roosting in a cave located in Southern China’s Yunnan Province, nearly 1,000 miles from Wuhan.Bats, it turns out, are not first-time offenders. In fact, over the past 30 years there have been 6 significant human viral outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, and Ebola, where bats appear to be the “natural reservoir” of the viruses. Such viruses are termed zoonotic if they are are capable of transmission from animals to humans. The fact that bats harbor so many zoonotic viruses, including coronaviruses, capable of direct or indirect transmission to humans is not surprising: they live in extremely densely populated roosts where viral transmission occurs rapidly and they are the only mammals capable of flight, which likely functions as an accelerator in viral transmission and mutation across bat populations.In many of these viral outbreaks, researchers have suggested that there was an intermediate animal species that formed the viral bridge to humans. In the SARS outbreak of 2002–2003, for example, there was evidence suggesting that the SARS virus was passed from bats to civets, wild raccoon-like animals sold for human consumption in Chinese “wet-markets,” and from civets to humans. In the case of MERS, the virus appears to have been passed from bats to camels and then to humans.In an important study, however, Professor SHI demonstrated that some SARS-like coronaviruses, which she identified in bat populations in Yunnan province, are directly transmissible to humans from bats without intermediate animal hosts. She was able to demonstrate this by showing that a significant percentage of people that lived within close proximity to the bat caves had antibodies for same SARS-like coronaviruses that were discovered in the local bat populations, suggesting that these people had been previously infected by the bats.Importantly, in the case of the COVID-19 virus, there are no known intermediate horseshoe bat populations within the Wuhan region, so direct transmission from bats to humans in the Wuhan region is unlikely.So far, attempts to identify an intermediate animal host for the COVID-19 have been unsuccessful and the argument for natural, direct transmission from bats to humans in Wuhan remains unlikely given the lack of intermediate horseshoe bat populations in the Wuhan region. However, it is undisputed, that the COVID-19 virus did originate in bats, as it is an almost perfect match to one of the bat-borne virus samples previously studied by Professor SHI at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.THE WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY AND ITS “P4” LABORATORYPhoto: Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan China, the First Biosafety Level 4 (“P4”) Lab in ChinaThe City of Wuhan, located in Hubei province in Central China, boasts a population of more than 11 million. Wuhan is also home to China’s first biosafety level 4 laboratory, the highest achievable level of biosafety, often termed “P4” or “BSL-4.” The Wuhan “P4 Lab” at the institute was completed in 2015, with the help of French experts, representing the first time that China would join only a handful of countries possessing labs capable of studying, storing and experimenting on the most dangerous viruses known to humankind, including deadly bat-borne coronaviruses like those associated with MERS and SARS.Prof. Yanhi WANG, a young, communist party insider, was appointed to run the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018. The fact that she also runs the Wuhan branch of a major political party (China Zhi Gong Party) under the Chinese Communist Party is not surprising, as party allegiance is often just as important as experience and qualifications in appointments to roles, like that of Prof. Yanhi WANG in overseeing the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Directly under Prof. Yanhi WANG, and responsible for managing the P4 Laboratory within the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is the renowned Prof. Zhengli SHI, often called “China’s Bat Woman,” and known for her valuable, but high-risk work with bat-borne coronaviruses.THE WUHAN CENTER FOR DISEASE PREVENTION AND CONTROLIt is particularly noteworthy that the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control is located approximately 280 meters from the Huanan wet-market, the alleged origin of the COVID-19 virus.Based on an account from Scientific American’s interview with Prof. Zhengli SHI of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it was the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control that had first identified a novel coronavirus within several hospital patients exhibiting atypical pneumonia symptoms at some point prior to December 30, 2019.Dr. Botao XIAO of the South China University of Technology pointed out in a paper he submitted for peer review (which has since been withdrawn and is now only available on Internet Archives) that the Wuhan CDC was also involved in research involving bat-borne pathogens. As Dr. Botao XIAO points out, there are a number of peer-reviewed, published academic articles, where Jun-Hua TIAN of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention is noted as the collections specialist for trapping pathogen-bearing animals in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. The fact that Jun-Hua Tian of the Wuhan CDC, which does not operate at biosecurity level 4, was involved in the collection of pathogen-bearing animals in Yunnan province, the same area where Prof. Zhengli SHI originally discovered the bat-borne coronaviruses that led to both SARS and COVID-19, is particularly noteworthy.THE HUANAN SEAFOOD WHOLESALE MARKETChina News Service／中国新闻网 / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)Located approximately 9 miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and 280 meters from the Wuhan branch CDC is the Huanan Seafood Market. This “wet-market” is the centerpiece in the Chinese government’s official narrative around the origin of the COVID-19 virus. Wet-markets, like the Huanan Seafood Market, sell relatively pedestrian proteins alongside a variety of live, exotic, wild animals for human consumption, such as the civet cats implicated in SARS or pangolins, scaly raccoon-looking animals, which some researchers hypothesized were the intermediate host animals for the COVID-19 virus. However, there is no evidence or history of bat consumption, either at this wet-market or in the Hubei province, generally. In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that bats are consumed anywhere in Central China.Photo: Wuhan Institute of Virology, 9 Miles from the Huanan “Wet-Market” Source: Google MapsPhoto: The map of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) and Huanan Seafood Market, with a distance of only 277 meters. Source: “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus” by Botao XIAO, Feb 2020.The Huanan wet-market is much like the wet-markets implicated in the trade of SARS-infected civet cats, which allegedly gave rise to the SARS outbreak of 2002–2003 in Southern China. The market would, therefore, seem to be a very plausible origin for the COVID-19 virus, especially if the earliest recorded cases of the disease could all be linked directly or indirectly to the Huanan wet-market. Unfortunately, early published patient data suggest that the wet-market was likely NOT the origin of the virus or where the first animal-human transmission occurred.THE LANCET JOURNAL AND WUHAN PATIENT DATAThe Lancet, a globally recognized, peer reviewed journal on medicine, published a research paper by Chinese researchers on some of the earliest recorded cases of COVID-19 on January 24, 2020. Importantly, the submission of this academic paper occurred before the Chinese government implemented a form of academic censorship around COVID-19 by requiring researchers at Chinese universities to obtain ministerial approval prior to submitting papers to academic journals. Given that data contained in this paper contradict the official explanation that the origin of the virus was the Huanan wet-market, it is doubtful that this academic paper would be published today, despite its high value to the global scientific and medical communities.This academic paper, entitled “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” examined 41 of the earliest recorded cases of COVID-19 during the month of December 2019. The most striking data set in this paper is shown in the below chart, which clearly shows that (a) 34% of the cases (14 of 41) could not be tied to the Huanan wet-market and (b) the first identified case of COVID-19 on December 1, 2019 had no exposure to the wet-market. Subsequent mathematical genomic mutation analyses, such as those completed by Professor Trevor Bedford, are consistent with the timeline established in the chart data below, confirming the first human emergence of the virus in “late November or early December 2019.”Source: “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China” Published January 24, 2020. The Lancet.More and more evidence seems to suggest that the Huanan wet-market was not actually the origin of the virus or where it jumped from bats to humans.PRIOR HISTORY OF LAB ACCIDENTS IN CHINA INVOLVING CORONAVIRUSESLab outbreaks of highly infectious diseases are not just a Hollywood fantasy. In fact, in the mid-2000s there were four significant lab-based “leaks” of the SARS virus, as documented by the World Health Organization. Two of these lab accidents involved the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing in 2004. In these two separate incidents, lab workers became infected with the SARS virus. The incidents were so concerning that the WHO actually rewrote global biosafety guidelines for managing virus samples and infected animals.In one of these two incidents in 2004, a 26-year-old female laboratory researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing, which was known to be investigating the SARS coronavirus at the time, developed symptoms of SARS. She subsequently infected her mother, who later died, and a nurse at the Beijing hospital where she was treated. This nurse, in turn, infected a number of family members.Memory of these recent lab outbreaks, no doubt, influenced the US Embassy in Beijing to take the unusual step of dispatching science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.US DIPLOMATIC VISITS AND WARNINGS OF SAFETY ISSUES AT WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY (2018)On March 27, 2018 a U.S. delegation led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the US embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health, toured the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Clearly, if this lab were involved in bioweapons research, as claimed by some conspiracy theorists, the lab would have never hosted such a delegation. What the delegation did find, however, was still concerning, according to subsequent diplomatic cables. The U.S. delegation met with the head of the institute, Prof. Yanyi WANG, as well as China’s leading bat coronavirus expert, Prof. Zhengli SHI, who heads the BSL-4 laboratory at the institute. In addition to this March 2018 meeting, the U.S. embassy in Beijing allegedly dispatched science diplomats on several prior occasions to the institute. According to an April 14, 2020 article by Josh Rogin in the Washington Post, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had allegedly been on the US Embassy’s radar ever since it achieved BSL-4 status in 2015.Photo: March 27, 2018 Photo Showing US Delegation to Wuhan Institute of Virology. From Left: Rick Switzer, Zhengli SHI, Yanyi WANG, Jamison Fouss, Zhihong HU. Source: WIV Press Release, Deleted Around April 14, 2020 But Preserved on Internet ArchivesSubsequent to these visits, several “Sensitive But Unclassified” diplomatic cables relayed lab safety concerns around the viral research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to this Washington Post article. These concerns also cited the institute’s “risky” research into bat coronaviruses and the obvious human pandemic potential.CHINA FAST-TRACKS BIOSECURITY LAW IN FEBRUARY 2020We may never know all of the details around the individuals, exact timelines, and lab data that pertain to the possible, accidental lab release of the COVID-19 virus. Nonetheless, the constellation of facts pointing to (and perhaps actual knowledge of) a lab accident in Wuhan likely influenced the Chinese government’s decision to fast-track its new biosecurity legislation, which will also cover the labs in Wuhan and the collection of coronavirus-bearing animals, like intermediate horseshoe bats.CONCLUSIONS AND CLOSING REMARKSAll evidence and data that I have reviewed, thus far, are consistent with an accidental lab outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, where the virus likely made its first jump from bats to humans, potentially without an intermediate animal host at all. It is with an even higher degree of certainty, though, that I assert that the Huanan wet-market was not the actual origin of the COVID-19 outbreak.The Chinese authorities’ lack of transparency, dogged insistence on the increasingly unlikely Huanan wet-market narrative, and stifling restrictions on domestic COVID-19 research suggest that there is much more to the story. More data and facts around the origin and human emergence of the COVID-19 virus are critically important, not for political or finger-pointing reasons, but for scientific reasons. In order to better manage the next zoonotic coronavirus outbreak, it is critical to understand exactly what happened in the initial days of the COVID-19 outbreak.Sources:25-Apr-2004 “SARS Escaped Beijing Lab Twice” https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-beijing-lab-twice-501371-May-2004: “Chinese authorities on alert as SARS breaks out again” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC403836/Oct-2004 “WHO guidelines for the global surveillance of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Updated recommendations, October 2004” https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/WHO_CDS_CSR_ARO_2004_1/en/3-Feb-2015 “China Inaugurates the first biocontainment level 4 laboratory in Wuhan” http://english.whiov.cas.cn/News/Events/201502/t20150203_135923.html14-Mar-2016 “SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence” https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc480124430-Nov-2017 “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2919028718-Apr-2018 Deleted Press Release on WIV Website Regarding Rick Switzer’s Visit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200221211935/http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/Foreign_Visits/201804/t20180403_191334.html19-Dec-2018 “SARS-Like Coronavirus WIV1-CoV Does Not Replicate in Egyptian Fruit Bats” https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/10/12/727/htm12-Jan-2020 World Health Organization’s Outbreak Update on the Novel Coronavirus — China: https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/23-Jan-2020 “Discovery of a novel coronavirus associated with the recent pneumonia outbreak in humans and its potential bat” origin https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v124-Jan-2020 “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext31-Jan-2020 “Coronavirus Outbreak Emerged From Bats Genomic Findings Suggest” https://www.genengnews.com/news/coronavirus-outbreak-emerged-from-bats-genomic-findings-suggest/Feb-2020 “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus” Botao Xiao https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https:/www.researchgate.net/publication/339070128_The_possible_origins_of_2019-nCoV_coronavirus11-Mar-2020 “How China’s Bat Woman Viruses from SARS to the new Coronavirus” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/14-Apr-2020 “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/