Alan Gottlieb
By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
The Second Amendment Foundation has filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., challenging the District of Columbia’s requirement that concealed carry permit applicants provide a “good reason” to qualify for a permit, alleging that this violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
SAF is joined by three private citizens in the case, Brian Wrenn and Joshua Akery, both of Washington, D.C., and Tyler Whidby, a Florida resident who also maintains a residence in Virginia, according to a press release. The city and Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier are named as defendants.
The 13-page complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit asserts that “individuals cannot be required to prove a ‘good reason’ or ‘other proper reason’ for the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.” All three individual plaintiffs in the case have applied for District carry permits and have been turned down by Lanier because they could not “Demonstrate a good reason to fear injury to person or property.”
“The city’s requirements to obtain a carry permit are so restrictive in nature as to be prohibitive to virtually all applicants,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “It’s rather like a ‘Catch 22,’ in which you can apply all day long, but no reason is sufficiently good enough for Chief Lanier to issue a permit.”
According to SAF attorney Alan Gura, the city is still appealing its earlier loss in the Palmer v. D.C.case, which struck down the city’s total ban on carrying handguns. The courts have not yet ruled on SAF’s claim that the city’s “may issue” law violates the Palmer injunction.
Alan Gura
“We are going to give the courts every chance to bring Washington, D.C. into constitutional compliance,” said Gura, who represents SAF and the other plaintiffs in both cases.
SAF has challenged other restrictive concealed carry laws over the past few years, since its victory in the 2010 Supreme Court case of McDonald v. City of Chicago. That case incorporated the Second Amendment right tko keep and bear arms to the states, via the 14th Amendment.
SAF has targeted so-called “may issue” carry laws in New York state, New Jersey, Maryland and California. Attempts to get such cases before the U.S. Supreme Court have so far been unsuccessful. A case in California is currently before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Critics of “May issue” laws contend they are open to abuse by local officials.
“Because of that,” Gottlieb explained, “the city has set the bar so high that it relegates a fundamental civil right to the status of a heavily-regulated government privilege. That is not only wrong, it also does not live up to previous court rulings.”
“Law-abiding citizens who clear background checks and are allowed to have handguns in their homes are being unnecessarily burdened with the additional requirement of proving some special need,” Gottlieb said in his press release. “The last time we checked, we had a Bill of Rights that applied to the entire nation, including the District. It’s not, and never has been, a ‘Bill of Needs’.”
