...the fact remains that the District of Columbia is not a state. Hepburn v. Ellzey, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 445 (1805). The question of incorporation is therefore not before the Court.Nothing in Petitioners’ precedent suggests that the District is free to ignore constitutional restrictions.
* * * Washington was not planned as a “Forbidden City” in which federal officials would be shielded from the hazards of interaction with the otherwise-free people of the United States. Quite the contrary:
It is important to bear constantly in mind that the District was made up of portions of two of the original states of the Union, and was not taken out of the Union by the cession. Prior thereto its inhabitants were entitled to all the rights, guaranties, and immunities of the Constitution. . . . [I]t is not reasonable to assume that the cession stripped them of these rights. . . .O’Donoghue, 289 U.S. at 540.Finally, there is no logic to Petitioners’ extraordinary claim that gun control “is the most important power of self-protection” for the seat of government. Pet. Br. 38. The District Clause, after all, allows Congress to “[erect] Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock- Yards and other needful Buildings.” U.S. CONST. art. I, § 8, cl. 17. Congress surely has the power to regulate firearms in Washington; but if Congress felt that disarming Americans at home were necessary for its security, it might have attempted to do so in the first 177 years of the city’s service as the seat of government. As recent history demonstrates, those who would attack our capital are hardly deterred by Petitioners’ ban on handguns and functional firearms in the home.
Very good research nicmarlo, and exactly on point.
(the only way to prevent all our other woes is for the “people” to be armed).