Mayor Adrian Fenty has announced the city has formally filed an appeal to the Supreme Court in the hopes that it will overturn a March decision in which a lower court found that the District’s ban on handguns was unconstitutional. Though the appeal has been a month in the making, Fenty and D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer today explained their reasoning in an op-ed published in the Post. In it, they reject the individual right to own firearms while arguing that the Second Amendment does not preclude states from imposing regulations on the ownership and use of guns. Moreover, they state that the handgun ban is central to ensuring the safety of District residents.

We’ve long been on the fence on this one. On the one hand, there is little doubt that urban areas should enjoy the right to impose reasonable regulations on guns, included among those registration requirements, strict and thorough background checks and mandatory safety training courses. On the other hand, it’s tough to argue that the District’s outright ban on handguns is reasonable. In looking at the issue as black and white — D.C. either bans handguns or allows everyone to own them, carry them and sell them — both Fenty and Singer may have missed some important gray areas in the lower court’s decision. The court clearly argued that regulations on guns are permitted, but not those that are so extreme so as to completely prevent a regular resident from possessing one. In essence, the court held that the District could regulate guns, just not ban them.

The appeal couldn’t come at a tougher time. In terms of the makeup of the Supreme Court, it’s difficult to argue that the newly empowered conservative wing won’t look to this case as a great chance to further their cause — just as they did with cases regarding affirmative action, pay discrimination and student speech. And when it comes to timing, well, it’s not easy to make the case that the handgun ban makes District residents safer when the weekend saw a spate of killings and our homicide tally is higher than it was this time last year. Sure, that doesn’t mean much in practice — after all, we could have no more killings this year — but it makes for some awkward symbolism.

The best outcome for Fenty is that the Supreme Court hears the case and rules in favor of the city. That not being terribly likely, the second best they could hope for is that they choose not to hear the case and force the District into re-tooling their gun laws according to the conditions set by the lower court. Worst of all — for both the District and every other urban area in the country — would be that they hear the case and rule that gun ownership is an absolute individual right that no municipality can regulate.