In US District Court in the D.C. Circuit, DC’s restrictions on guns as they currently are have been upheld. You can find the opinion here. I think this is wrong, but it’s worth noting that the original Heller case, then known as Parker v. DC failed at the District Court level too, but won on appeal. No guarantee this happens here, however.
For a lot of reasons, I’m not too enthusiastic about proceeding forward at this point with challenges to assault weapons bans. Let’s get the court to say a bit more about the right first, before opening that whole can of worms. I agree the common use test here should easily protect them, but just because it’s correct doesn’t mean that’s what the courts will do.
UPDATE: Just skimming, this is an awful ruling. No attempt was made to determine whether DC’s state public safety goals with their ridiculous gun control scheme could be achieved with a lesser level of infringement. It’s hard to see what gun control law would fail this level of scrutiny applied by the District Court.
Plus, the decision says that that the council had hearings and called witnesses on the AW ban. This is just not true. There were no hearings on the second round of rules.
I’m not sure what the proper analysis would have been, but I agree that I don’t see very many gun-control laws failing to survive this standard.
And how did anyone actually determine “large capacity feeding devices’ are not in common use? You’ve got to be kidding me. The opposite is true; it’s become quite difficult to find low-capacity magazines for many pistols.
Also remember that this court knocked down Heller on the first round as well. Let’s see how the appeal goes.
This is good for our side. A district court ruling, realistically, means virtually nothing. It’s only once it’s taken up the line that people really begin paying attention. Furthermore, had our side won, we’d be stuck with whatever we got, rather than being able to appeal and seek a full victory.
They didn’t put much into this ruling because they expect it to go right back to the Supreme Court anyway; they just threw out as much as they could to give D.C. as much support for as many options as they could in the meantime.
That’s my first impression. Not sure it makes any sense or will still make sense tomorrow, but what the hell? I was wrong once before, and that didn’t bring the world to an end.
Well, it sets the floor for standard of review – and I suspect that the floor will be raised before it gets to SCOTUS.
The “assault” weapon section was pure horse crap, but the registration part didn’t bother me much. By not going into any analysis of what lesser restrictions could serve the same purposes, this decision set itself up for easy reversal if strict scrutiny becomes the standard.