WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court has blocked a District of Columbia law that makes it difficult for gun owners to get concealed carry permits.
A divided three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Tuesday that the law requiring people to show “good reason to fear injury” or another “proper reason” to carry a weapon infringes on residents’ Second Amendment rights.
D.C. officials can ask the full appeals court to review the ruling.
Under the law, reasons to get a permit might include a personal threat, or a job that requires a person to carry or protect cash or valuables. Lower court judges have disagreed on whether the law is constitutional.
Judge Karen Henderson dissented, saying she believes the law passes constitutional muster.
This is an astonishing decision, from a panel of 3 of the more conservative judges on the DC Circuit. It reads almost like a stream of consciousness final exam in high school – disconnected thoughts come from everywhere over the course of 34 or so pages. The panel simply glides over Heller’s instruction that the Second Amendment was concerned with protection of the home, finding instead that the right to “bear”, i.e., carry, arms is on equal footing with the right to possess them. The holding of the opinion is that a jurisdiction’s (here, DC) attempt to impose a “good reason” standard to carry weapons in public violates the Second Amendment.
Judge Karen Henderson, who is by no means a member of the Court’s progressive wing, dissented. In the space of just 5 or so pages, she demolishes (IMHO) the majority’s specious reasoning, I suspect the full court will get a crack at righting this ridiculous decision.
Hopefully the ruling will stand and DC will become a “will issue” jurisdiction. Then hopefully we can move to a constitutional carry system nationally.
There is a right to own a firearm within your home, but it is a common law right, and may or may not include a handgun. As such the right is, like every common law provision, subject to local jurisdiction including restriction and outright ban if local magistrates deem that in the interest of public safety. That is the only right a citizen has to a weapon, and it only applies on private property. There is no common law right to carry a loaded weapon on public property when not serving in the militia.
There is no constitutional right to personally possess a firearm. The 2nd Amendment refers exclusively to the right to bear “arms”, arms in 18th century parlance referring only to weapons of war, not a squirrel gun, in the context of the regulated states’ citizen militias. The amendment itself became obsolete with the advent of federal standing armies and the conversion of the colonial era citizens’ militias to each state’s National Guard units, where weapons are secured in armories and issued during periods of service.
That is the more charitable reading, ignoring the substantial evidence that the guarantee against federal disarming of states’ militias was inserted mainly to preserve the southern slave patrols whose sole purpose was to continually terrorise the slave populations to forestall a slave revolt.
Heller was wrongly found and negated all prior Supreme Court jurisdiction on the question. Prior opinions were few for the simple reason that throughout our history the militia-only context of the 2nd was well understood, but then the NRA rolled out their national sales-boosting program about 50 years ago.
Over 35,000 gun deaths a year in the US and these 3 right wing judges think we need more gun deaths. Amazing. I doubt any of them play softball or travel far without their security detail. Unlike the rest of us stuck with streets over flowing with guns…over 330 million guns and things aren’t getting safer, they are sliding into civil war fatality death count territory.
Yeah, that’s totally the kind of country people who aren’t batshit insane paranoids with dick size issues want to live in. Yay.