Via Shutterstock.

Via Shutterstock.

Update: Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie issued a statement on Sullin’s ruling, saying that he disagrees with the Court’s decision.

“I believe that the District’s handgun law as passed last year is constitutional,” McDuffie said. “Furthermore, courts have upheld laws substantially similar to ours. I will be discussing the matter with the Mayor as well as the Attorney General to determine next steps.”

On Twitter, Mayor Muriel Bowser also said that she’s prepared to fight to protect D.C.’s gun laws.

Original post:

A federal judge has ruled that a key provision to D.C.’s recent concealed carry gun law is unconstitutional.

In a 23-page decision issued yesterday, Judge Frederick Scullin ruled that the provision of the city’s recently implemented concealed carry law—in which a District resident must prove to police that they have “good reason to fear injury to his or her person” or “any other proper reason for carrying a pistol”—violates Second Amendment rights.

“This conclusion should not be read to suggest that it would be inappropriate for the District of Columbia to enact a licensing mechanism that includes appropriate time, place, and manner restrictions on the carrying of handguns in public,” Scullin wrote in his decision. “The District of Columbia’s arbitrary ‘good reason’/proper reason’ requirement, however, goes far beyond establishing such reasonable restrictions. Rather, for all intents and purposes, this requirement makes it impossible for the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens to obtain licenses to carry handguns in public for self-defense, thereby depriving them of their Second Amendment right to bear arms.”

This is a major win for gun rights activists, who complained that D.C.’s concealed carry law was too restrictive. In February of this year, two D.C. residents and a Florida resident filed a federal lawsuit against the District over the concealed carry law.

Last year, the D.C. Council passed emergency legislation in response to a federal court ruling that found D.C.’s ban on carrying handguns outside the home unconstitutional. “The city’s requirements to obtain a carry permit are so restrictive in nature as to be prohibitive to virtually all applicants,” Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said in a statement at the time of the lawsuit. “It’s rather like a ‘Catch 22,’ in which you can apply all day long, but no reason is sufficiently good enough for Chief Lanier to issue a permit.”

But you can expect the city to put up a fight. Recently, Attorney General Karl Racine said that his office is holding off on trying to overturn a federal judge’s decision that D.C.’s previous handgun ban was unconstitutional to instead try and defend the city’s concealed carry law.

“Going forward, our energies are best spent focusing on defending the current law,” Racine said last month.

Filed Under: concealed carry law, gun laws, karl racine,