The Justice Department is suing D.C. police, calling the District’s ban on AR-15s and other weapons unconstitutional.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, government attorneys chastised the city for its code that bans most semiautomatic rifles and certain firearms from being registered with the police department, ultimately making any possession of those weapons illegal. Among the prohibited weapons are AK-47s and AR-15s.
Without registration, people who own these firearms for lawful purposes are subject to misdemeanor charges and fines, prosecutors said.
“Their decisions to deny certificates of registration for commonly possessed semiautomatic firearms runs afoul of binding Supreme Court precedent,” prosecutors said in the filing, “and therefore trample the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”
Prosecutors cited a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that held that people may possess firearms in their homes for purposes such as self-defense, invalidating a handgun ban that the District had in place at the time.
A D.C. police spokesperson declined to comment, citing active litigation.
In August, the Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors in D.C. not to seek felony charges against people who are carrying rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital, regardless of the strength of the evidence. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro defended the policy in a statement to The Washington Post in August, saying that D.C.’s blanket prohibition on carrying shotguns or rifles “is clearly a violation of the Supreme Court’s holdings.”
The lawsuit comes as the White House has heralded gun seizures in D.C. as proof that the federal law enforcement surge ordered by President Donald Trump has been a success. A page titled “Achievements” on the White House website says that Trump’s D.C. crime crackdown resulted in the seizure of hundreds of firearms. And a Post report found that illegal gun possession was the most common charge among arrests involving federal agents during the crackdown. In the first four weeks of the surge, The Post found that one in four of those arrests involved gun charges.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted near-daily tallies of gun seizures in the early days of the law enforcement surge and has touted Washington gun arrests as positive as recently as last week.
“Our federal surge in DC has saved countless lives, removed hundreds of illegal guns off the streets, and led to a dramatic drop in crime in our nation’s capital city,” she posted on Xon Wednesday.
In a news release announcing the lawsuit Monday, Bondi emphasized her “ironclad commitment” to Second Amendment rights. “Washington, DC’s ban on some of America’s most popular firearms is an unconstitutional infringement on the Second Amendment — living in our nation’s capital should not preclude law-abiding citizens from exercising their fundamental constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
The Justice Department wants city police to admit that they violated the Second Amendment, according to the lawsuit, and asks a judge to permanently ban D.C. police from arresting or fining law-abiding people for possessing assault weapons.
The post Justice Dept. sues D.C. over ban of AR-15s and other semiautomatic guns appeared first on Washington Post.
