D.C. – Your gun law is unconstitutional!
Today, the Heller v. D.C. gun ban case attorney Alan Gura filed motion for summary judgment in the latest case against D.C. and its continuing defiance of the people and the constitution. Read the whole thing, it is good.
This case presents what is arguably the easiest Second Amendment question that might come before a federal court today, seeing as the question has just been answered by the Supreme Court less than a year ago: may the District of Columbia ban handguns of the kind in common useby Americans for ordinary lawful purposes? The answer: no. Heller v. District of Columbia, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008).
Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s express language dismantling the District’s handgunban, the city enacted another far-reaching handgun ban, excluding from private ownership any handgun that does not appear on the State of California’s “Roster of Handguns Certified for Sale.” This attempt to enumerate every single handgun that might be legally sold is, predictably, too ambitious a task not to yield arbitrary and irrational results. But California’s pre-Heller rostering program cannot possibly be considered constitutional, founded, as it is, on the theory specifically rejected in Heller as inconsistent with the Second Amendment – that common firearms might be banned based merely on the government’s assessment that their possession is not in the public interest.
As the legislative record demonstrates, the California law consciously sought to alter the choices made in the mass market for common guns – precisely the sort of conduct proscribed by the Second Amendment. And as Defendants now admit in their answer, some of the California law’s most restrictive aspects do not advance, and might even reduce, public safety.
Heller did not eliminate the government’s ability to ban weapons that are outside the scope of Second Amendment protection. But as the three handguns at issue in this case demonstrate, Defendants’ new scheme is intentionally designed to and does ban guns that easily pass the Heller test for protected Second Amendment arms. Indeed, the exact same model handgun at issue in Heller, which the Supreme Court ordered Defendants to permit not one year ago, has been re-banned by the city and denied to plaintiff Paul St. Lawrence because it has not been (and cannot be) placed on the “Roster of Handgun Certified for Sale.” Mr. St. Lawrence’s wife, Gillian, was denied permission to own a handgun that had once been “rostered” and approved for sale, but which is now no longer legal to own in Washington, DC because the gun’s manufacturer will not pay an annual fee in perpetuity to keep it on the list. And plaintiff Tracey Hanson was denied permission to own a handgun because, effectively, it is the wrong color.
It is impossible to reconcile the roster of arms approved for sale in the Bill of Rights with that conjured by the operation of California law. The latter must yield.
Oops! Yes, you read that right. Alan Gura is saying that California’s Roster of Safe Handguns is UNCONSTITUTIONAL! If the new D.C. law go down in flames the California roster might soon meet the same fate. California has used insignificant cosmetic and functional differences to firearms as a basis for legislating firearms unsafe for years. When this “common sense” motion passes hopefully that slim frame ambidextrous safety Glock 21 you have had your eye on for the last year could finally be yours allowing you to lefties to do swift emergency or tactical reloads.