A federal appeals court has blocked Washington, D.C.’s “good reason” regulations for issuing concealed-carry permits to law-abiding citizens on Second Amendment grounds.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that lower courts must issue permanent injunctions blocking enforcement of the D.C. law. In the ruling, the court said the Second Amendment does not allow for bans on carrying a firearm “absent a special need for self-defense.”
In the majority opinion, Circuit Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote: “In fact, the Amendment’s core at a minimum shields the typically situated citizen’s ability to carry common arms generally. The District’s good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on exercises of that constitutional right for most D.C. residents. That’s enough to sink this law under Heller I.”
The city’s “good reason” regulations have been in effect since 2014.
