January 22nd, 2008 by Alan Gura

I’m looking forward to arguing the case in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, March 18, at 10:00 a.m.

January 11th, 2008 by Alan Gura

Amicus Curiae briefs for the city have been filed and are now available on our filings page.

Next event:

Our brief, February 4.

January 4th, 2008 by Clark Neily

We have just received DC’s Merits Brief and Joint Appendix.

November 20th, 2007 by Alan Gura

Washington, D.C.—Today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will hear the case of Heller v. District of Columbia, and decide whether the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the right to own guns.  At issue is a 31-year-old Washington, D.C. law banning handguns and requiring that all shotguns and rifles be kept unloaded and either trigger-locked or disassembled at all times.  There is no exception for self-defense.

Alan Gura, lead counsel for the Heller plaintiffs said, “The Bill of Rights does not end at the District of Columbia’s borders, and it includes the right to keep and bear arms.  After three decades of failure trying to control firearms in the District, it’s time for law-abiding city residents to be able to defend themselves in their homes.  We are confident the Supreme Court will vindicate that right in Washington, D.C., and across the nation.”

Dick Heller, a District resident who works as an armed security guard protecting the lives of various government officials during the day but is forbidden by District law from keeping a handgun at home to protect himself, explained, “I want to be able to defend myself and my wife from violent criminals, and the Constitution says I have a right to do that by keeping a gun in my home.  The police can’t be everywhere, and they can’t protect everyone all the time.  Responsible gun ownership is a basic right we have as American citizens.”

The Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment case since 1939, when it issued a confusing and inconclusive decision in a case involving the interstate transportation of a sawed-off shotgun.  The case ended before the defendant had the opportunity to establish whether sawed-off shotguns are covered by the word “arms” in the text of the Amendment.  But regular shotguns, along with rifles and handguns, are precisely the kind of “arms” the Framers had in mind in drafting the Second Amendment.  The District’s functional firearms ban defies the Framers’ obvious intent to ensure that the government could never disarm citizens in America, as other governments have done elsewhere.

Clark Neily, a public interest lawyer specializing in constitutional law cases and co-counsel to the Heller plaintiffs said, “The Second Amendment is every bit as much a part of the Bill of Rights as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.  The framers of our Constitution made clear that the government has no more business disarming citizens than it has censoring them or telling them what values to hold sacred.”

“The citizens of Washington, D.C. − indeed, all Americans − deserve a clear pronouncement from the nation’s highest court on the real meaning of the Second Amendment,” stated Robert Levy, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and co-counsel to the Heller plaintiffs.  Levy added, “Later cases will decide what gun regulations are constitutional, but an outright ban on all functional firearms clearly is not constitutional.”

Heller will likely be the highest-profile case on the Court’s docket this term, and it promises to be among the most closely watched constitutional law cases in decades.  At stake is not just the question of whether people have a constitutional right to own guns, but also the Court’s willingness to stand up for rights that are clearly expressed in the Constitution, even when those rights are strongly opposed by a vocal minority.

Oral argument will most likely be scheduled for March or April, with a decision expected by June 2008.

October 4th, 2007 by Clark Neily

We filed our response to D.C.’s cert petition today.  The response explains that while we agree the Supreme Court should review the case, we disagree with many of D.C.’s key assertions.  Supreme Court Rule 15.2 provides that the response brief should address “any perceived misstatement of fact or law in the petition that bears on what issues properly would be before the Court if certiorari were granted.”  Accordingly, our response discusses a number of points we believe D.C. got wrong in its petition, including particularly its attempt to portray this case as only involving a handgun ban, when in fact as we have previously explained (and as the D.C. Circuit specifically found), the challenged laws amount to a total ban on all functional firearms within the home.

Other problems with D.C.’s cert petition include its mistaken characterization of the D.C. Circuit’s Parker decision as being “outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence,” which it plainly is not, and D.C.’s extraordinary claim that its gun ban has been a resounding public policy success, which of course it has not. 

D.C. now has the opportunity to file a reply brief.  We expect the Supreme Court to announce in early November whether it will grant cert.  We also have our conditional cross-petition pending, in which we have asked the Supreme Court to review the D.C. Circuit’s decision that only one of our clients, Rich Heller, has standing to challenge D.C.’s gun ban.  So the remaining plaintiffs are still very much in the case.

September 25th, 2007 by Clark Neily

The D.C. Circuit has denied our motion to lift the stay of its mandate.  But in doing so, the court made some interesting observations about the self-defense exception that D.C. now claims exists in the spirit, though not the text, of D.C. Code § 7-2507.02, which requires even lawfully owned firearms to be unloaded and either disassembled or trigger-locked at all times.  Of particular interest are the court’s observations about the dangers posed by a rifle’s range and the pellet spread of a shotgun, as well as the difficulty of “handling such long weapons in enclosed spaces — particularly by smaller individuals.”  Those points obviously go to the reasonableness of allowing people to defend themselves with, say, a high-velocity hunting rifle that can put a round through an entire apartment building, but forbidding them from using a pistol that is actually designed for use in close quarters and presents much less risk to innocent bystanders. 

 The order is here:  D.C. Circuit’s Order Denying Motion to Lift Stay of Mandate.

September 24th, 2007 by Clark Neily

D.C. has filed this Opposition to Motion to Lift Stay of Mandate.  We expect to file our reply early next week.

September 24th, 2007 by Clark Neily

This week’s edition of Legal Times features a piece by Bob Levy called Loaded for the High Court in which he responds to D.C.’s assertion that its gun ban is constitutional because (1) it only applies to handguns; (2) the Second Amendment only restrains the federal government, not states or local government entities like D.C.; and (3) D.C.’s gun ban is reasonable because it has saved “thousands of lives.”  As Bob explains, none of those claims stands up to scrutiny.

September 12th, 2007 by Clark Neily

The cert petition filed by the District on September 4 was odd in a number of respects, including the extent to which it focused more on the supposed merits of maintaining D.C.’s gun ban than explaining why, from a broader jurisprudential standpoint, the Supreme Court should accept this particular case.   Equally remarkable was D.C.’s attempt to reinvent the case as merely involving a handgun ban, rather than a ban on all functional firearms, which is the actual law.  Thus, D.C. Code § 7-2507.02 specifically provides that all lawfully owned firearms in the home must be kept unloaded at all times and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.  That’s a gun ban, every bit as much as it would be a book ban if the law said you can have a book in your home, but you have to keep it closed at all times.

Despite the fact that the text of the statute contains no exception for self-defense — and despite the fact that D.C. has a track record of prosecuting people who use unregistered pistols for self-defense — the District represented to the Supreme Court that it ”does not . . . construe this provision to prevent the use of a lawful firearm in self-defense.”  Let’s say we take that statement at face value, as well as the one where D.C. told the Supreme Court that D.C. law ”authoriz[es] private possession of shotguns and rifles.”  Surely that means functional shotguns and rifles, right?  Because otherwise, how are citizens supposeed to use their shotgun or rifle in self-defense, as D.C. now claims § 7-2507.02 permits?  Swing their unloaded shotgun or rifle like a baseball bat or throw it at their assailant?  Or maybe victims are supposed to ask their would-be robber/rapist/murderer for a “time out” while they painstakingly reassemble and then load their shotgun or rifle in order to render it an actual, functional firearm.

Assuming D.C. really means what it said to the Supreme Court — namely, that D.C. only limits the ownership of handguns, not shotguns or rifles — and assuming further that D.C. recognizes that only functional firearms can be used for for self-defense, then it stands to reason that D.C. has no further intention of trying to defend D.C. Code § 7-2507.02.   Accordingly, we filed this motion today asking the D.C. Circuit to lift the stay of its mandate and formally enjoin D.C. from enforcing the provisions of § 7-2507.02 requiring lawfully owned firearms in the home to be unloaded and either disassembled or trigger-locked at all times.  We will post D.C.’s response when it arrives.

September 10th, 2007 by Alan Gura

Here’s our Press Release announcing the filing of our conditional cross-petition. The cross-petition is available here.  Here is D.C.’s cert petition and appendix.

Citizens in Gun Challenge Ask Supreme Court to Reinstate Their Case Against the District of Columbia

Washington, D.C.—Five Washington, D.C. residents today filed a petition in the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to reinstate their legal case against the District’s restrictive gun laws. The five citizens, Shelly Parker, Tom Palmer, Gillian St. Lawrence, Tracey Ambeau, and George Lyon, filed a federal court challenge to the District’s gun ban in 2003 along with D.C. resident Dick Heller. That lawsuit led to a historic court ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that D.C.’s gun ban violates the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

But the appellate court also held that among the six plaintiffs, only Heller had the necessary “standing” to challenge the law. On September 4, 2007, the District filed papers asking the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court on the merits of the gun challenge. The five other plaintiffs besides Heller—Parker, Palmer, St. Lawrence, Ambeau, and Lyon—today filed their own petition asking the Supreme Court reinstate their case against the District and allow them to proceed along with Heller as they did in the lower courts for over four years. The Supreme Court will likely decide in late October whether to accept the appeals.

Today’s cross-appeal raises an extraordinarily important question about when citizens may vindicate their constitutional rights in federal court. Defying decades of Supreme Court precedent, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held it was not enough that people who wish to keep guns in their home for lawful self-defense risk going to jail under the District’s well-known “zero tolerance” policy if they do so. Instead, the court held that in order to challenge any criminal law in federal court, citizens must first break the law, wait for the authorities to discover their violation, and then receive a personal threat of prosecution. But the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected that view, recognizing the unfairness of forcing citizens to choose between breaking the law and going to prison, on the one hand, or giving up valuable constitutional rights, on the other.

The Parker plaintiffs’ lead counsel Alan Gura explained, “The government isn’t in the habit of sending warning letters to people before it violates their civil rights. Requiring this type of personalized threat as a prerequisite for filing a civil rights lawsuit slams the courthouse door on law-abiding people who just want to exercise their constitutional rights.”

Plaintiff Gillian St. Lawrence said, “I want to keep a gun in my home for self defense. I believe I have that right under the Constitution. But the only way for me to get a court ruling is to get break the law and wait to get caught? That’s not right. I should be able to stand up for my rights without having to risk going to jail.”

The appellate court found that among the six plaintiffs only Heller had standing to challenge D.C.’s gun ban because he—unlike the other plaintiffs—tried unsuccessfully to register a pistol in the District. But that was a futile act because District law prohibits the registration of any pistol after 1976. As a matter of common sense and Supreme Court precedent, the government may not require citizens to jump through meaningless hoops in order to have their civil rights claims heard in court. The court of appeals’ conclusion that Parker, Palmer, St. Lawrence, Ambeau, and Lyon lacked standing to challenge the District’s unconstitutional gun laws because they did not first fill out a meaningless form contradicts that principal and creates a dangerous civil rights precedent in the nation’s capital.