The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division’s new focus on citizens’ Second Amendment-protected rights is continuing. The Civil Rights Division is now suing the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) because the District government and MPD “unconstitutionally ban the AR-15 and many other firearms protected under the Second Amendment.”
Current gun laws in D.C. require anyone who wishes to own a firearm within the federal enclave to register it with D.C. Metro Police. The thing is, the “D.C. Code provides a broad registration ban on numerous firearms—an unconstitutional incursion into the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens seeking to own protected firearms for lawful purposes,” says the DOJ.
The MPD currently denies D.C. residents the ability to register many firearms that are commonly owned in the U.S. This presents the possibility of otherwise law-abiding citizens “facing wrongful arrest for lawfully possessing protected firearms.”
“Today’s action from the Department of Justice’s new Second Amendment Section underscores our ironclad commitment to protecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a press release. “Washington, DC’s (sic) ban on some of America’s most popular firearms is an unconstitutional infringement on the Second Amendment — living in our nation’s capital should not preclude law-abiding citizens from exercising their fundamental constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
“This Civil Rights Division will defend American citizens from unconstitutional restrictions of commonly used firearms, in violation of their Second Amendment rights,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division. “The newly established Second Amendment Section filed this lawsuit to ensure that the very rights D.C. resident Mr. Heller secured 17 years ago are enforced today—and that all law-abiding citizens seeking to own protected firearms for lawful purposes may do so.”
This struggle for freedom in our nation’s capital began in 2003 when then D.C. special policeman Richard Heller sued Washington, D.C., because he was required to carry a gun while on duty in the District but could not carry one home for his own self-defense. This eventually led to the U.S. Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller (2008), in which the Court reaffirmed that the Second Amendment is indeed an individual right.
The Heller decision, notes the Civil Rights Division, reaffirmed that the “Second Amendment does, in fact, protect the rights of law-abiding citizens to own a semi-automatic weapon in their homes for lawful purposes, such as self-defense. Unfortunately, today, the District still prevents ownership of these very same weapons through a pattern and practice of broadly blocking gun registration. Law-abiding citizens throughout our nation’s capital are facing wrongful arrests due to the enforcement of unconstitutional laws.”
We’ll keep you posted on future developments in this and other cases.
