Federal Judiciary

New Second Amendment case in D.C.

By Akin Gump Supreme Court Practice Group

Dick Anthony Heller, the private guard whose desire to have a gun in his Washington, D.C., home won the right to do that from the Supreme Court, returned to federal court on Monday with a claim that his new-found right has already been violated.  Joined by two other Washington residents, Heller filed a lawsuit to challenge the just-enacted District of Columbia gun law replacing provisions struck down by the Supreme Court. The complaint in Heller, et al., v. District of Columbia can be found here.  (The case does not yet have a docket number in District Court.)

The lawsuit contended that the D.C. City Council violated his Second Amendment right by adopting a new ban on machine guns written so broadly as to outlaw “ordinary handguns and other firearms which are semiautomatic,” by authorizing local police to impose “onerous” new restrictions on registering handguns, and by enacting new limits on when a gun in the home could be loaded and unlocked or disassembled.

Heller and another resident, Absalom F. Jordan, Jr., asserted in the lawsuit that they had been denied permits this month for semiautomatical pistols because the weapons were each treated as a “machine gun.” A third resident, Amy McVey, contended, as did the other two Washingtonians, that they were required to go through extensive checks in order to try to register handguns.   They also contended that the new restrictions on having handguns loaded and unlocked in the home were unduly burdensome on their right to have a gun for self-defense.

The lawsuit asked the Court to strike down the challenged provisions under the Second Amendment, to issue an order requiring the registration of semiautomatic pistols (if those shoot no more than 12 shots without reloading manually), to bar the new requirement that any gun offered for registration go through a ballistics text, and to nullify the new restrictions on having a gun ready for self-defense at home.

Full post as published by SCOTUSBLOG on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).