Brian Doherty
Reason.com
7/28/2014
Tom Palmer (who works for the libertarian institutions the Atlas Network and the Cato Institute and has been a movement intellectual and activist since the 1970s) over the weekend, to his great surprise, won his long-simmering case overturning D.C.’s ban on carrying legally registered weapons in public. The case had been languishing in U.S. District Court in D.C. for mysterious reasons for five years and a Saturday decision release is unusual.
The core of the decision in Palmer v. D.C., which relies quite a bit on a case from the 9th Circuit in California, Peruta v. San Diego, which I blogged about in March.
In light of Heller, McDonald, and their progeny, there is no longer any basis on which this Court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny. Therefore, the Court finds that the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional. Accordingly, the Court grants Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and enjoins Defendants from enforcing the home limitations of D.C. Code § 7-2502.02(a)(4) and enforcing D.C. Code § 22-4504(a) unless and until such time as the District of Columbia adopts a licensing mechanism consistent with constitutional standards enabling people to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms. Furthermore, this injunction prohibits the District from completely banning the carrying of handguns in public for self-defense by otherwise qualified non-residents based solely on the fact that they are not residents of the District…
The article continues at Reason.com
Related: Doctor Who Stopped Shooter Praised, Not Fired. Common Sense is still alive
Dr. Lee Silverman, a psychiatrist at Mercy Health Systems in Pennsylvania, shot a patient last week after the man opened fire, killing another staff member.
The problem was Mercy Health has a no guns on premises policy and rumors were swirling that Silverman would lose his job for ignoring the policy. The rumors were apparently false as the hospital has now released a statement praising Silverman’s “swift action”…
