Free Republic

Alan Gura, the Alexandria, Va., attorney who won the historic Supreme Court ruling last year establishing a personal right to have a gun for self-defense at home, started a new challenge in the Supreme Court Tuesday. It seeks to have the Second Amendment right enforced against state, county and city gun control laws. The petition in McDonald, et al., v. City of Chicago, can be downloaded here.(PDF) (A docket number has not yet been assigned.) Last week, the National Rifle Association filed a separate appeal raising the same issue (NRA, et al., v. City of Chicago, docket 08-1497). It is...

After the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia's handgun ban last June, gun-rights advocates trained their sights on similar restrictions in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill. Last month, the National Rifle Association received ammunition from an unlikely source: the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal litigation shop. In a brief filed with the federal appeals court in Chicago, the center not only argued that gun ownership is a constitutional right, it also employed the legal method popularized by such conservative icons as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. That method is originalism, which seeks to apply the law today according...

A D.C. woman filed suit in U.S. District Court yesterday, claiming that the city would not let her register a pistol because of its color. Tracey A. Hanson argued that her application to register a .45-caliber semiautomatic was denied because the gun is not on the California Safe Handgun Roster, which is the standard in the city. Hanson tried to register a two-tone, stainless steel/black pistol, according to the suit. But the list has that model in olive drab green, dark earth or black, not in two-tone, stainless/black, the suit asserts...

BELLEVUE, Wash., March 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Second Amendment Foundation and three Washington, D.C. residents today filed a lawsuit challenging a regulation by District of Columbia city government that arbitrarily bans handguns based on a roster of "acceptable" handguns approved by the State of California. The District is using this list despite a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer that protects handguns that ordinary people traditionally use for self-defense. This scheme could eventually bar the ownership of any new handguns. Attorney Alan Gura, representing the plaintiffs in this case, noted that District bureaucrats "told Tracy Ambeau Hanson her...

Lawyers who won the historic Second Amendment gun rights case in the Supreme Court — District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290) — on Monday asked a federal judge to award them more than $3.5 million for attorneys’ fees, plus $13,215.30 for expenses and court costs. In a motion and memorandum filed with U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the attorneys said that they had achieved “one of the most profound and important victories available under our system of justice.” Their argument also suggested that this was a David vs. Goliath clash, with the attorneys on their far side far outnumbered...

There’s been some confusion about how the Supreme Court’s decision is to be implemented, and what it means for DC’s registration system, going forward. We’d like to clear the air. The handgun that Mr. Heller tried to register in 2002, the registration of which was ordered by the courts, is a nine-shot revolver. It is fully registerable under D.C. law as it stands today, and Mr. Heller will have it registered to him. We are not expecting the city to resist the registration of this firearm. Once the gun is registered to Mr. Heller, he can use it to defend...

. For decades the Second Amendment might as well have been called the Second-Class Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court spent the late 20th century expansively interpreting the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth amendments, not to mention unenumerated rights ranging from travel to sexual privacy. But not until last month did the court hold that the Second Amendment means what it says: that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." What took so long? I put the question to Alan Gura, the 37-year-old wunderkind lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in District of Columbia...