The District’s restrictive gun laws have long been hated by Second Amendment activists everywhere, who have tried pretty much everything, including near-annual congressional legislation, to overturn them. Today might be their day, though — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has found that the District’s gun restrictions are unconstitutional.

In a decision published today, the court wrote that the District’s restrictions on gun ownership, which date back to 1976, unconstitutionally infringe upon the rights of citizens to bear arms. The court’s opinion, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman, argued that gun ownership is an individual right and that the city’s restrictions — which include a ban on handgun purchases or ownership (though guns bought before 1976 are exempt) and mandate that rifles and shotguns be kept unloaded and disassembled — violate the spirit of the Second Amendment. The case stems from a lawsuit filed by six District residents in February 2003, four of which expressed a desire to own handguns for self-defense, one of which owned a shotgun but wanted to keep it assembled and loaded and one who is a special police officer and wants to keep a gun at home. None of the residents expressed a desire to carry the gun outside their homes, nor did they seek to challenge the right of the city to mandate firearm registration.

The District’s lawyers argued that the Second Amendment guaranteed only a collective right to gun ownership (as part of a “well-regulated militia”), that the District is a not a state and thus not subject to the provisions of the amendment (which, they argued, are limited to residents of “free states”) and that handguns were not conceived of when the Second Amendment was written (the court responded by arguing that such a standard would allow only the ownership of sabers). Judge Karen Henderson agreed with the District in her dissent to the court’s decision.

The court’s decision doesn’t mean that we’ll soon be able to rush out to the corner store and buy a .38 along with our gallon of milk, though. The court’s ruling only clarifies some constitutional points and orders a lower court to allow a suit filed by Dick Heller, one of the appellants, to move forward. Heller, the special police officer, actively filed a request to register a handgun, but was turned down by the District. Since he suffered an injury in the legal sense of the word, he’s being allowed to proceed with his suit. The decision is important, though, in that an important court has actively interpreted gun ownership in such a fashion that it might shoot down ownership and possession regulations across the country. While the District can appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, the additions of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both conservative icons, may push the highest court in the land to uphold the appellate court’s interpretation of gun ownership as being an individual, not a collective right.

Might the District’s gun laws soon coming tumbling down? Not anytime soon with the way the legal system works, but this decision has laid the foundations for it.