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To: DaveLoneRanger
Are they really going to allow defensive carry in DC now?

No, not if I am understandng the decision correctly.

The court's opinion specifically addressed only those parts of the D.C. gun law which required all guns to be kept unloaded and made non-functional by partial disassembly or some other approved means of rendering it inoperable, those which made it illegal to carry a gun even between rooms in a home, and to those which required registration of handguns but disqualified guns for registration if they had not been previously registered before a certain date in 1975.

IOW, under the law that was overturned no one in the D.C. could legally possess a registered but functioning handgun even in his or her own home, and if you legally possessed a nonfunctional registered handgun you couldn't legally carry it anywhere, not even between rooms of your home. If this 3 member panel is upheld by the full panel of the circuit, those parts of D.C. law gun will be thrown out unless the USSC agrees to hear an appeal by the district and reverses the circuit court.

But to answer your question directly, if I am reading the majority opinion correctly no other parts of the D.C. gun law will be affected. That means that the D.C. can still require all guns to be registered, and carrying guns outside the home can still be prohibited. The decision doesn't go far enough by any means, but it's a start for forcing the D.C. to respect it's residents' 2nd Amendment rights. If my understanding of the decision is incorrect, which it may well be, I hope someone better qualified to understand it will correct my mistakes.

445 posted on 03/09/2007 1:06:49 PM PST by epow
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To: epow; R. Scott
"... But to answer your question directly, if I am reading the majority opinion correctly no other parts of the D.C. gun law will be affected. That means that the D.C. can still require all guns to be registered, and carrying guns outside the home can still be prohibited."

Presuming those laws exist, you mean.

I take it that at this very moment an FFL holder still operating inside of Washington DC could make a Title 1 transfer to a resident of the district. If DC is silent on various firearms laws because they believed all these years that their outright ban (now overturned) caused those laws to be moot, then perhaps a citizen of DC could find themselves walking out of a gun store gun in-hand via 'instant check'. To answer R. Scott's question, I'm not convinced it matters one bit whether the police are aware of the repercussions of today's reversal.

That's why I posted in the first replies in this thread that if there is one FFL dealer still operating in DC, then that dealer ought to and should be able to sell a handgun to a citizen of the District of Columbia. If I were a Freeper living in the city of Washington DC, I would be inquiring this evening as to where I can buy a firearm tomorrow simply because my Federal Court says I can. I would presume it's also legal to acquire one from an out-of-state family member without going through an FFL, just like Sarah Brady did for her son.

I suppose that it's possible to open a gun store in the same DC building that the Brady Campaign operates out of. You could probably host a gun show within sight of Sarah Brady's office in Washington DC.

If the District Court of DC has ruled that the citizens of the district have rights to keep and bear arms, that also means that there must be some provision by which citizens of DC can acquire firearms, correct? To prevent this would be against today's reversal. If the cops tried to step in, now they're violating the citizen's 4th Amendment rights and they could have their asses sued off.

If a court reversed a ruling on RU-486 or 'medical marijuana' in a given locality, how long do we think that liberals would wait before they sought to fill their cupboards with abortion pills and visited a doctor to get a prescription for weed?

Why should a conservative citizen of Washington DC wait for a handgun a minute longer than a liberal would wait for an abortion? The court has spoken.

510 posted on 03/09/2007 1:58:43 PM PST by The KG9 Kid
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