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D.C. is petitioning a federal appeals court to take another look at its strict concealed-carry gun law, after a panel of three judges deemed the law unconstitutional.

The law, which requires that people must have a “good reason” for police to grant them a permit required to carry concealed handguns, was blocked by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on a 2-1 decision in late July, though the law remained in place while city officials had a month to decide whether to appeal to the full court.

“At a minimum the [Second] Amendment’s core must protect carrying given the risks and needs typical of law-abiding citizens,” wrote Judge Thomas B. Griffith in his majority decision. “That is a right that most D.C. residents can never exercise, by the law’s very design.”

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine says that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit should rehear the case with its full slate of judges “due to the importance of this question, which affects the safety of every person who lives in, works in, or visits the District.”

He argues that the D.C. Council wrote the “good reason” law to address “the District’s particular public-safety challenges while preserving the ability of its most vulnerable citizens to publicly carry a handgun when there is a special self-defense need.”

The council developed that law after a court ruling in July 2014 that D.C.’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public was unconstitutional, and the city needed to designate where handguns could be carried in public by licensed owners.

So the council brokered a law that requires a person demonstrate a “good reason to fear injury to his or her person or property” to get a handgun permit. According to the Washington Free Beacon, 127 such permits have been granted as of July 2017.

That law has been challenged by Second Amendment advocates as well. It was blocked from implementation by one federal court judge in May 2016, until a month later, when another judge’s ruling permitted the city to enforce the law. New Jersey, New York, and Maryland all have similar legislation.

“The District’s requirement that those requesting concealed-carry permits must have a ‘good reason’ for doing so is virtually identical to rules in other cities and states—requirements that four other federal appeals courts have left in place,” Racine said in a statement.

Petition for Rehearing en Banc Wrenn v. DC FILED by Rachel Kurzius on Scribd