Federal judge declares D.C. ban on carrying handguns in public unconstitutional

[Chan790]

21. This could end up being a cluster-fuck.

This isn't going to stand well...DC's handgun prohibition was not principally, but nevertheless intentionally, in place to reduce complications resulting from the myriad legal entanglements that occur when you have entire large areas of the city which are not marked but fall under the jurisdiction of federal agencies with differing legal-statuses for firearms and their own police forces. (DC has 27 operating jurisdictional law-enforcement agencies within its borders) The US Park Service and Capitol Grounds explicitly still ban carrying handguns (I don't know about other LE agencies)...and nobody in the federal government really wants that to change. (Coincidentally, the area under control of the Capitol Hill Police (and thus the exclusion zone) is a lot larger than people realize...it extends well off the Capitol Grounds and into surrounding streets, containing not only the US Capitol but also the areas around the Office Buildings and Library of Congress.) It's what keeps people with handguns off the doorstep of the US Capitol and the White House, away from the Monuments and Smithsonian...and a lot of the rest of the non-residential areas of the city. It effects a necessary safety buffer for the public welfare and maintenance of public order. It's going to create a patchwork of disparate legal-statuses for handguns across the city--literally block-by-block in the Capitol Hill and Downtown areas of the city.

This is going to become apparently an issue when a person walking down the 1600-block of E St NW where it would be legal to carry a handgun takes one step past the curb onto the 1700-block of E St NW entering a national park and the exclusion zone around the White House and is now a felon punishable by years of imprisonment--if the US Secret Service or US Park Police doesn't shoot them dead on sight. (Both have 24-hour sniper coverage of the area. It's scant 2 blocks from the White House on the Constitution Ave. NW side where you don't know you're that close to the White House until--viola!-there it is: South Lawn of the White House.)

This isn't a good thing for gun owners, it's a very bad thing for gun owners which is going to result in a lot of attempting-to-be-responsible gun-owners to potentially become felons and lose RKBA, a lot of police confrontations and potentially a few shootings. More likely, an Act of Congress will quietly be crafted to invalidate the ruling; slipped into something innocuous and passed without fanfare to maintain the desired status-quo without raising the ire of the NRA or RKBA activists.