DC Gun Ban Struck Down

The Macaca Post reports:

A federal appellate panel [Friday] struck down parts of the District's gun law as unconstitutional, ruling that the city cannot bar people from keeping firearms in their homes.

The decision was a victory for six D.C. residents who said they wanted to keep firearms for self-defense. But it could have much broader implications: The case eventually could wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court as a test of the thorny issues surrounding the Second Amendment and the public's right to keep weapons.

The District has one of the strictest gun laws in the nation -- barring all handguns unless they were registered prior to 1976 -- and that law has come under attack over the past three decades in Congress as well as the courts. [The] ruling guts key parts of the law, but does not address provisions that prohibit people from carrying unregistered guns outside the home.

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The ruling came on a 2-to-1 vote by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...

"We conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms," [Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman] declared in the 58-page majority ruling.

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The Supreme Court addressed the Second Amendment in 1939, but it did not hold that the right to bear arms meant specifically that an individual could do so.

[The] majority opinion said that the District has a right to regulate and require registration of firearms but not to ban them outright in homes. The ruling also struck down a section of the D.C. law that required owners of registered guns to disassemble them, saying that would render the weapons useless.