By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The Justice Department has sued Montgomery County, Maryland for a Second Amendment violation, asserting in its complaint that the county’s new gun control law, Bill 23-26, prohibits law-abiding citizens from possessing firearms in daily life.
Remarkably, the announcement comes just over a month after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Wolford ruling against the concealed carry restrictions in Hawaii.
“The Second Amendment does not allow local governments to ban law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms in public places as they go about their daily lives,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Montgomery County makes it almost impossible for a law-abiding citizen with a valid carry license to walk down the street and avoid these exclusion zones. The Civil Rights Division will not stand idle while Montgomery County tramples the rights guaranteed to law-abiding citizens by the Second Amendment.”
The Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section enforces the Second Amendment, the Police Pattern or Practice Act (34 U.S.C. § 12601), and Executive Order 14206. If you are a current or prospective gun owner and believe that a state or local government has infringed your right to keep or bear arms, please submit a complaint through the section’s website.
According to the DOJ, the breadth of Bill 23-26’s prohibition, includes a 100-yard exclusion zone. This makes it “practically impossible for individuals in the County to go about their daily business while lawfully carrying a firearm.”
“Therefore,” says the DOJ, the ordinance violates the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Wolford v. Lopez, where the Court held a law that bans citizens from carrying firearms into, “places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines . . . hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”
Maryland has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation, including a ban on so-called “assault weapons.”
