In a 2-1 ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down some of the District’s handgun registration laws as unconstitutional including a regulation that limited District gunowners to one handgun registration per month.
There was no immediate indication about how this ruling might affect other litigation chaenging the District’s gun laws, now or in the future. But one national gun rights leader was upbeat.
“Any time a Federal Appeals Court strikes down any anti-gun law it is a great victory for gun rights,” said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). “I think this ruling is going to reay help the Second Amendment Foundation’s Wrenn v. District of Columbia case that is chaenging the DC carry law requiring ‘good cause’ or ‘special need’ to get a permit that is now before the same Federal Appeals Court.”
Writing for the majority, US District Judge Douglas Ginsburg noted that a requirement that people bring their handguns to the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters might actuay be contrary to public safety. He said the city had provided no “substantial evidence” that public safety benefited from making people bring a handgun to police headquarters.
“On the contrary,” Ginsburg wrote, “common sense suggests that bringing firearms to the MPD would more likely be a threat to public safety.”
He suggested there was a risk of the gun being stolen, or someone being arrested or even mistakenly shot by a police officer. Whether any of these scenarios were considered when the law was written is not clear.
The ruling did uphold some of the city’s gun laws, including fingerprinting and photographing gunowners. However, the requirement to re-register firearms every three years was also struck down.
UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler suggested that the ruling strengthens the argument that some gun laws are constitutional, including gun registration.
Quoted by the Associated Press, Winkler observed, “States that want to require gunowners to register their guns wi be buoyed by this decision.”
