WASHINGTON — Gun rights advocates have been working for years to undo the District of Columbia’s tough restrictions on firearms ownership. Now they have won a new legal victory — one that has thrown city officials into a tailspin over the prospect of gun owners carrying weapons on the streets of the nation’s capital.
At issue is the city’s decades-old ban on carrying handguns in public. Over the weekend, a Federal District Court judge struck down that ban, declaring it unconstitutional. On Tuesday, the same judge, responding to a request from lawyers for the city, put a 90-day hold on his ruling.
Now District of Columbia officials must decide whether to appeal the decision — a move that gun rights advocates say they would welcome, on the theory that it might give rise to an eventual Supreme Court case — or write a new law laying out specifications for who could carry a gun and under what circumstances.
City officials said Tuesday that no decision had been made. Mayor Vincent C. Gray is expected to address the issue at a news conference on Wednesday morning. But the ruling in the case, Palmer et al. v. District of Columbia, alarmed gun control advocates and left gun rights advocates elated.
“One could read this ruling as allowing rampant carrying of firearms in the District of Columbia,” said Jonathan E. Lowy, legal director for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, adding that would be “a nightmare scenario for law enforcement particularly given the high-profile targets, the foreign dignitaries, tourists, public officials” who visit.
The Palmer case is the outgrowth of a carefully planned strategy by gun rights advocates to roll back restrictions on gun ownership across the nation. It was first filed in 2009, backed by the Second Amendment Foundation, a small nonprofit organization based in Bellevue, Wash. In 2008, the same group won a landmark Supreme Court Case, District of Columbia v. Heller, that overturned the city’s ban on gun ownership.
“D.C. has been on our list for a long time,” said Alan Gottlieb, the organization’s founder. Of the latest ruling, he said: “We’re ecstatic. This case now opens up doors for us for even additional litigation, and we’re quite excited about it.”
In the Heller case, the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment, which invokes the right to bear arms as part of a “well-regulated militia,” extended to individuals. In a subsequent decision, the justices overturned Chicago’s citywide gun ownership ban and extended the Heller decision to the states.
While those cases eliminated all handgun bans in the country, they left open the question of whether other gun restrictions, such as prohibitions on carrying weapons in public, were constitutional. One by one, mostly through legislative action in the states, but also as a result of court rulings, such bans have fallen, typically replaced with laws giving law enforcement officials the authority to decide who can carry guns in public.
The District of Columbia’s ban was the last such law in the nation. Ruling on Saturday in the Palmer case, Senior Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr., who ordinarily sits in Syracuse, struck down the law, saying “there is no longer any basis” on which he could construe the ban as constitutional “under any level of scrutiny.”
That a judge from outside the District of Columbia decided the case created a minor uproar here. The Palmer case was initially assigned to the federal court in the District of Columbia, which has jurisdiction, but that court has a backlog. So in July 2011, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who as the overseer of all federal courts must ensure that cases move through the system — reassigned it, along with other cases, to Judge Scullin.
In Washington, where multiple law enforcement agencies — including the local police and a separate federal force that safeguards the Capitol — operate in concert, the decision created immediate confusion, which prompted the city to ask for the ruling to be placed on hold.
“Under the current ruling, possession of a firearm outside of the home or business in and of itself MAY NOT be criminal,” Chief Cathy Lanier of the Metropolitan Police Department wrote in a memo to her officers on Monday, using capital letters for emphasis. But, she added, “District residents are still PROHIBITED from possessing a firearm that is not legally registered in the District.”
The mayor’s office said law enforcement officials still had the authority to restrict guns on city property, including schools, recreation centers and City Hall. A spokesman said Mr. Gray “remains committed to having reasonable gun safety measures in the District.”
Going forward, if the city does not appeal, its officials will have to decide just what those measures should be. Mr. Lowy said the court acknowledged that “guns can be banned in sensitive places.” He added, “And there’s no question, that there are many sensitive places in D.C.”