PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
D.C. gives up total carry ban to focus on ways to deny permit applications :: 04/06/2015
Thwarted by the courts from enforcing an outright ban, District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine will concentrate resources on defending laws designed to deny concealed carry permits, his office reported in a Wednesday press release. The legal strategy will now fall back to defending “may issue” laws requiring “good cause,” as determined by the District's government.
“We need to focus our energies not on litigating old laws, but defending new ones that our leaders enacted in good faith to comply with court rulings while still protecting public safety,” Racine announced. “The Council enacted a law that sets a process by which individuals may apply for gun licenses, which has superseded the law at issue in Palmer v. District of Columbia. Going forward, our energies are best spent focusing on defending the current law. We are vigorously defending it in the district court, and we are confident that it will be upheld.”
The result of those “current laws” is that, as reported in January, eight people, or .00001 percent of the District’s residents had been permitted to carry a gun. Of all applications, which included non-residents, more had been denied than approved.
Racine’s public air of confidence will be tested as conflicts between courts leave an ultimate judicial ruling on “may issue” vs. “shall issue” concealed carry permits up in the air, while a movement in the states to adopt permitless “Constitutional carry” is growing. The Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to Maryland’s “may issue” law in 2013, but state challenges to “shall issue” rulings before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California could force the High Court’s hand.
Also unclear is what effect the decision by Racine’s office will have on efforts in Congress to compel the district to loosen up on the infringements. With the administration arguing for “home rule” and with a seeming concession that still denies the right to bear arms to the vast majority of individuals who wish to exercise it, there is still much "good faith leadership" the Republican-dominated House and Senate could do to show gun owners they know who helped them attain their majorities.
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