It may be Legal to Carry a Handgun in the Nation’s Capitol by Christmas

And if not by Christmas then perhaps by the first day of Spring because today Senior Federal District Court judge Frederick J. Scullin, Jr., denied a motion made by lawyers for the District of Columbia to reconsider his earlier decision striking down the city’s ban on carrying handguns in public, regardless of whether the handguns were carried openly or concealed.   One would have thought that the Plaintiffs in that case would have been overjoyed at the result but they were not.  One of the Plaintiffs in the case is the Second Amendment Foundation headed by Alan Gottlieb.   The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) opposes your Second Amendment right to openly carry a firearm for the purpose of self-defense.  As the United States Supreme Court held in its landmark decision District of Columbia v. Heller, the Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry firearms openly but said that states and local governments are still allowed to prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons.   The National Rifle Association (NRA), which is not a party to this lawsuit, also opposes your Second Amendment right to openly carry a firearm for the purpose of self-defense and has been defending a racist ban on openly carrying loaded firearms in public in the state of California for nearly five years now.     That ban was enacted in 1967.  Not only did the NRA endorse the ban at the time, the NRA helped write the ban.   Both the NRA and the SAF want to deny your Second Amendment right to openly carry firearms and want to turn your right into a privilege allowing for only the carrying of concealed handguns and only then if you have a government issued permission slip.   And so the SAF being unhappy with a decision that allows for the Open Carry of handguns agreed to a 90 day stay of the decision by Judge Scullin in order to give the District of Columbia time to write a law which bans the open carry of handguns and which would require that one have a government issued permission slip to carry a handgun concealed.   The District of Columbia subsequently enacted a law which requires a permit to carry a handgun concealed but in order to obtain the permit, the law requires that one show a heighted need for a permit.  Living in a high crime community, according to D.C., does not constitute a valid reason for being issued a permit.   The Second Amendment Foundation, through its attorney Alan Gura,  filed a motion for a permanent injunction against a subsection of the new law which created a requirement to have a permit but did not seek an injunction against the subsection requiring permit holders to carry their handguns concealed.   Ironically, because of the way the new law was written, should Judge Scullin grant the new motion for a permanent injunction, we will be right back were we were when Judge Scullin struck down the 2008 ban on carrying handguns regardless of whether or not they were carried openly or concealed.   This is because of the way the District of Columbia amended its old law to require a permit to carry a handgun and in a new subsection, prohibited personswith a permit from openly carrying handguns.   If Judge Scullin grants the permanent injunction against the permit requirement then it does not matter that persons with a permit issued from the District of Columbia are prohibited from carrying handguns openly, because the law applies only to persons who have a government issued permission slip issued by the District of Columbia.    In short, if no permits are required to carry a handgun in the District of Columbia then the new section of the law which restricts those permits to the carrying of concealed handguns is meaningless.   One wonders what the Second Amendment Foundation is going to do next.  Its objective of banning Open Carry and requiring a government issued permission slip to carry a handgun concealed will have failed.    Let us hope that everyone except the SAF, NRA and District of Columbia have a very merry Christmas by being able to exercise his or her right to openly carry a handgun in this Nation’s capitol on Christmas day.