INTERVIEW – JOHN LOTT – President, Crime Prevention Research Center
TOPIC: Guns in D.C. and Maryland
-Appeals court blocks D.C.’s concealed-carry law on Second Amendment grounds. A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down a District of Columbia gun-control measure that the court said is essentially an outright ban in violation of the Second Amendment. D.C. requires gun owners to have a “good reason” to obtain a concealed carry permit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the regulation as too restrictive in a 2-1 decision, The Washington Post reported. “The good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on most D.C. residents’ right to carry a gun in the face of ordinary self-defense needs,” Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote, according to the paper. “Bans on the ability of most citizens to exercise an enumerated right would have to flunk any judicial test.” The decision deals another legal blow to efforts by city officials to rewrite gun regulations since the Supreme Court declared a Second Amendment right to gun ownership in a 2008 D.C. gun case, the paper reported.
-Tensions flare at Baltimore City Council hearing on gun bill