Just as Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) proposed in October that restrictions on gun stores be eased, today he introduced legislation that would make the process of buying and registering a gun simpler for District residents.

The District might be readying to register handguns inside its police headquarters, but those looking to legally get a hold of a semi-automatic rifle are still out of luck.

Our sister site Gothamist brought our attention to the above map, created by Very Small Array, which labels each American state and the District of Columbia with the first autocomplete suggestion that popped up when the name of the jurisdiction was entered into Google last Friday night.

Photo by Samer Farha.The Supreme Court ruled today that Second Amendment protections extend to the states, finally extending the 2008 Heller decision that knocked down the District’s three-decade-old gun ban. But while the 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago means that outright gun bans can no longer stand anywhere else in the country, the ruling majority left open the possibility that local governments could impose restrictions and regulations based on their “needs and values.” Since…

Photo by Samer Farha Is there a parliamentary term for beating a dead horse? Because if there is, the Senate appears to be doing just that. Just a week after an amendment designed to gut the District’s gun laws effectively sunk legislation that would have granted the city a voting seat in the U.S. House, two senators are planning to go ahead and introduce stand-alone legislation doing away with many of the District’s existing…

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina has ruled that the District of Columbia’s post-Heller gun laws are indeed constitutional. In a decision handed down today, Urbina rejected assertions from Dick Heller, the plaintiff in the original Supreme Court case, et al., that the District’s strict gun registration laws violate the spirit of the 2008 Heller ruling. Instead, Urbina wrote, the D.C. government did everything it was supposed to do: Because the Council provided ample evidence…

Photo by Samer Farha It was on this day last year that the District’s longstanding and long controversial ban on handguns was upended, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such blanket prohibitions were an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment. More broadly, though, what had been the country’s strictest regulations of a specific type of gun gave the majority of the court the chance to rule that the Second Amendment granted an individual,…

Remember how last summer’s Supreme Court ruling on the District’s handgun ban promised to upend regulations and restrictions on gun ownership across the country? It doesn’t seem to be happening. The New York Times reported yesterday that of 80 cases that have come before lower federal courts in Heller’s wake, few have actually resulted in the overturning of federal laws limiting gun ownership, transport and use. (The article cites the case of an East St….

One relatively early vote from yesterday’s marathon final D.C. Council legislative session of the year was the approval of a number of changes to the District’s ever-evolving gun laws. (Quick aside: Must the Council always pull out these last-minute legislate-a-thons? They often make for bad laws, not to mention force local scribes to try to fit far too many votes into far too few words. And now back to our regularly scheduled post.) The Post…