The District of Columbia is, ironically, the seat of power for the freest nation on Earth, but is one of the least free cities in the country. I’d ask for someone to make it make sense, but I doubt that’s possible.
Some of those laws have been smacked down already. Heller challenged the D.C. restrictions that basically made it impossible to use a firearm for self-defense. A challenge to the district’s “may issue” measure went against them, though they decided to just accept it rather than challenge it to the Supreme Court, where officials figured they’d lose.
Based on what happened with New York, they were right.
It still has plenty of gun laws on the books, though, and now the district is facing a barrage of challenges.
In June 2025, Lorenzo Redman was sentenced to 18 months in a D.C. prison after he was convicted of possessing a gun as a felon. His public defender filed an appeal.
But that appeal wasn’t based on a procedural mistake or legal technicality. Rather, his attorney argued that in disarming felons, D.C. has been violating the Second Amendment.
Redman’s case — one of two pending before the D.C. Court of Appeals that challenges the District’s felon-in-possession law — is an example of what has become a legal assault on the city’s restrictive gun laws, including litigation around D.C.’s ban on high-powered rifles and high-capacity magazines.
Similar legal challenges have been percolating in courts across the country, and at least one will be heard later this year by the Supreme Court.
Proponents say they’re merely taking the path opened by the Supreme Court in 2008, when it overturned D.C.’s absolute ban on handgun ownership, and later in 2022, when it significantly raised the bar for gun restrictions to comply with the Second Amendment.
“The court has made clear the Second Amendment won’t be treated as a second-class right anymore,” said Clark Neily, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute and attorney who worked on the 2008 case that tossed out D.C.’s handgun ban.
But critics worry that the current litigation, if successful, will usher in an era of even more high-powered guns on the city’s streets, leading to more deaths. (D.C. police estimate that roughly three-quarters of the city’s homicides involve guns. As of September 1, 1,789 illegal guns have been recovered by police in 2026.)
Just something to note, though, is that if the police are pulling that many “illegal” guns off the streets, how in the hell does anyone think the problems in the district will get worse?
Those are criminals with guns, and they’re not exactly going to stop because you pass one more law. Those who are inclined to break the law aren’t going to decide not to just because the gun laws say they can’t, either.
The bans on so-called assault weapons and what are actually standard-capacity magazines will likely fall before the challenge to D.C.’s measure gets its last chance in court, but the issue with felons is the most interesting case.
The Rahimi decision made it clear that this court still feels gun rights can be taken away, and while I wish felons did real time but got their rights back in toto when they got out, that’s not what the court is likely to find. I suspect that challenge will go down in flames because of Rahimi, even if I’d rather it didn’t.
Honestly, I can’t feel bad for the district. They brought this on themselves.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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