Feds sue D.C. police over de facto ban on AR-15s

The federal Justice Department sued the Metropolitan Police Department on Monday over its treatment of would-be gun owners in the city, accusing the office of refusing to register common weapons like the AR-15 rifle.

City law requires guns kept at home or a place of business to be registered with police. The feds said the police department regularly refuses to certify semiautomatic rifles including the AR-15, the most popular style of rifle in production today.

That runs afoul of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms, federal lawyers argued in the new lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court.

“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,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The lawsuit names the city police department and outgoing Chief Pamela Smith.

Ms. Bondi said the lawsuit sprang from the department’s new Second Amendment Section, announced earlier this month and designed to force compliance with a generous reading of the Constitution’s gun rights portions.

The police department declined to comment.

The Washington Times has also sought comment from the city’s attorney general, which prosecutes misdemeanor crimes. Owning an unregistered gun is a misdemeanor.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose office handles felony prosecutions in the federal district, told The Washington Post over the summer that the city’s gun laws went too far and signaling her reluctance to use them.

The new lawsuit challenges what it calls a pattern or practice of denying Second Amendment rights by the police department.

The city’s previous gun ban laws resulted in a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the Heller decision, that for the first time found the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms included a personal right to self-defense through possession of a gun.

Washington responded to that 2008 ruling with the new law which, the feds said, still bans residents from owning popular guns.

Under city code, a dealer can’t sell a gun to a customer who doesn’t have a registration certificate.

The city also bans registration of what it calls an “assault weapon.” That includes specific models like the AR-15 rifle and the Striker 12 shotgun, and it also includes definitions that ban other guns, such as a shotgun with a detachable magazine or a long gun with a barrel shroud.

The new Justice Department lawsuit follows one filed last year by residents who said they either had been denied registration of a weapon or feared being denied if they applied.

In that case, the city government admitted its law bans AR-15 possession, but argued none of the plaintiffs had standing to sue.

The federal case provides a new, broader avenue of attack on the city’s gun controls. It agues that AR-15s and other common guns cannot be effectively banned under current Supreme Court precedent.

The high court justices, in June, declined to hear a challenge to Maryland’s assault weapons ban , over the vehement objections of Justice Clarence Thomas, who said such bans are unconstitutional.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who agreed with the majority in passing by the Maryland case, said the high court would likely deal with the issue “in the next term or two.”