In a win for Americans’ gun rights, the nations’ second most influential court struck down four of Washington, D.C.’s unconstitutional gun laws.
The ruling stems from a complaint that the city enacted unconstitutional registration laws after its decades-old gun ban was ruled unconstitutional in a 2008 Supreme Court ruling on a suit filed by 2nd Amendment activist Dick Heller.
Heller got another partial win on Friday, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit striking regulations that prevented residents from registering more than one handgun per month and requiring re-registration for legally owned firearms every three years. The court also killed city rules requiring gun owners to pass tests on firearms laws and make their weapons available for inspection by officials upon request.
“We agree with Heller that the District has not offered substantial evidence from which one could draw a reasonable conclusion that the challenged requirements will protect police officers; but we think the District has pointed to substantial evidence that some of the requirements — but not others — will promote public safety,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the ruling.
The court kept in place laws that require city residents to register long guns, complete a training course, provide fingerprints, pay fees and be photographed as part of the registration process.
The laws had previously been upheld by a federal judge. And Judge Karen Henderson, who dissented from the majority in the current ruling, said she would have kept all of the regulations in place.
“Those parts of the majority opinion display proper deference to the District in its ongoing efforts to formulate a workable firearms policy for our Nation’s capital,” she wrote in her dissent. “I believe my colleagues too readily abandon this approach, however, with respect to the knowledge test, present-the-firearm, re-registration and one-pistol-per-thirty days requirements.”
D.C.’s gun laws have long been the subject of scrutiny and were lampooned by journalist Emily Miller when she chronicled the endless bureaucratic hindrances to becoming a legal gun owner in the city in her 2013 book “Emily Gets Her Gun… But Obama Wants To Take Yours.”
Former Marine and liberty activist Adam Kokesh also sought to bring attention to the absurd gun laws the same year with a video showing himself loading a shotgun in the middle of Freedom Plaza. He was subsequently arrested and convicted of carrying a rifle or shotgun, possession of an unregistered firearm and unlawful possession of ammunition.
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