The Second Amendment Foundation, who backed the case that brought concealed carry to Washington D.C., is back in federal court fighting the District over its new and draconian may-issue permitting scheme that has declined more permits than it has granted.
Filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday, the suit, Wrenn v DC , is joined by three private citizens. Two of these are residents of the city and the third a Florida resident who lives in Virginia. All three had their concealed carry permit applications denied by the city and Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who are named as defendants. None of the three, who desired permits for the purpose of self-defense, could meet the District’s strict requirement to prove a need or good reason to do so.
“The last time we checked,” Alan Gottlieb, SAF’s executive vice president said in a statement obtained by Guns.com, “we had a Bill of Rights that applied to the entire nation, including the District. It’s not, and never has been, a ‘Bill of Needs’.”
Gottlieb contends the city’s laws, which have been decried as being some of the strictest in the nation, are so prohibitive that they virtually exclude all applicants.
Indeed, according to recently released figures, the city has only granted eight permits while declining 11 out of the 69 applications that have been submitted thus far.
“It’s rather like a ‘Catch 22,’ in which you can apply all day long, but no reason is sufficiently good enough for Chief Lanier to issue a permit,” explained Gottlieb.
The handful of permits are an effort to appease a federal court order that mandated the nation’s capital strike down its long-standing ban on carrying guns outside the home. That case, Palmer v D.C., was decided last July by U.S. District Court Judge Frederick J. Scullin, who allowed the city until Oct. 22, 2014, before his judgment went into effect.
Two of the plaintiffs, Brian Wrenn and Joshua Akery, both of D.C. residents, possess already hard-to-obtain firearms permits to possess handguns in their home, but were denied concealed carry permits over the good cause requirement. The third individual plaintiff, Tyler Whidby, a Florida resident and federal firearms licensee, sought a permit as he has to transport firearms through the District as part of his business and was likewise denied.
As noted by the Washington Post, the city will defend the District’s concealed-carry law in court.
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