Wrenn v. District of Columbia - 431 U.S. App. D.C. 62, 864 F.3d 650 (2017)

Rule:

The "core" or "central component" of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms protects individual self-defense by law-abiding, responsible citizens--though subject to certain "longstanding" regulations that limit the Amendment's scope, such as bans on possession by felons and the mentally ill. No one doubts that under Heller I this core protection covers the right of a law-abiding citizen to keep in the home common firearms for self-defense.

Facts:

The challenged D.C. Code provisions direct the District's police chief to promulgate regulations limiting licenses for the concealed carry of handguns (the only sort of carrying the Code allows) to those showing a "good reason to fear injury to [their] person or property" or "any other proper reason for carrying a pistol." The Code also limits what the police chief may count as satisfying these two criteria, in the course of promulgating regulations and issuing licenses. To receive a license based on the first prong—a "good reason to fear injury"—applicants must show a "special need for self-protection distinguishable from the general community as supported by evidence of specific threats or previous attacks that demonstrate a special danger to the applicant's life." The police chief's regulations further limit licenses granted on this basis to those who "allege, in writing, serious threats of death or serious bodily harm, any attacks on [their] person, or any theft of property from [their] person." For those seeking to establish some "other proper reason for carrying," the D.C. Code provides that an applicant's need to carry around cash or valuables as part of her job is sufficient. Two regulations implementing this criterion also specify that living or working "in a high crime area shall not by itself establish a good reason" to carry, but that having a close relative who is unable to meet his own special need for self-defense does.

The instant appeal involves two cases before different district judges. Both cases involve plaintiffs denied a concealed-carry license solely for failing to show a special need for self-defense. Bringing the first case are Brian Wrenn, the Second Amendment Foundation, Inc., and two of its other members. The second case features Matthew Grace and the Pink Pistols, an organization in which Grace and other members champion the right of sexual minorities to carry guns for self-defense. In each case, the plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction barring the District from enforcing the good-reason regulation. In March 2016, a district judge denied the Wrenn plaintiffs' motion. Two months later, another district judge granted the Grace plaintiffs a preliminary injunction barring the District from enforcing the good-reason law against anyone.

Issue:

Does the Second Amendment’s “core” extend to publicly carrying guns for self-defense?

Answer:

Yes.

Conclusion:

The District argues that it does not, citing Heller I's observation that "the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute" in the home. But the fact that the need for self-defense is most pressing in the home doesn't mean that self-defense at home is the only right at the Amendment's core. After all, the Amendment's "core lawful purpose" is self-defense, and the need for that might arise beyond as well as within the home. Moreover, the Amendment's text protects the right to "bear" as well as "keep" arms. For both reasons, it's more natural to view the Amendment's core as including a law-abiding citizen's right to carry common firearms for self-defense beyond the home (subject again to relevant "longstanding" regulations like bans on carrying "in sensitive places"). This reading finds support in parts of Heller I that speak louder than the Court's aside about where the need for guns is "most acute." That remark appears when Heller I turns to the particular ban on possession at issue there. By then the Court has spent over fifty pages giving independent and seemingly equal treatments to the right to "keep" and to "bear," first defining those "phrases" and then teasing out their implications. In that long preliminary analysis, the Court elaborates that to "bear" means to "'wear, bear, or carry . . . upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose . . . of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.'" This first gloss on the Amendment's text and Heller I's reasoning is reinforced by the history that Heller I deems essential for tracing the "pre-existing right" embodied by the Amendment. Heller I pores over early sources to show that while preventing Congress from eliminating state militias was the "purpose that prompted the [Amendment's] codification," that purpose did not limit the right's substance, which encompassed the personal right to armed self-defense. Crucially, Heller I winds its way to this conclusion through a parade of early English, Founding-era, antebellum, and late-nineteenth century cases and commentaries. Those same sources attest that the Second Amendment squarely covers carrying beyond the home for self-defense. Most of the relevant nineteenth-century cases, for example, assume the importance of carrying as well as possessing. Each puts another crack in the District's argument that carrying was peripheral to the right protected by the Amendment. Indeed, the few nineteenth-century cases that upheld onerous limits on carrying against challenges under the Second Amendment or close analogues are sapped of authority by Heller I because each of them assumed that the Amendment was only about militias and not personal self-defense. So Heller I rejects their crucial premise. "And with these cases off the table, the remaining cases speak with one voice" on the Amendment's coverage of carrying as well as keeping arms. Under Heller I's treatment of these and earlier cases and commentaries, history matters, and here it favors the plaintiffs.

The District further retorts that self-defense in public must fall outside the Amendment's core protections because the Amendment was codified in order to keep Congress from eliminating state militias, a purpose that doesn't require allowing people to carry guns in times of peace. But again, it was Heller I's central holding that the reason for the Amendment's passage did not narrow the sweep of its protections. Whatever motivated the Amendment, at its core was the right to self-defense. Thus, the Amendment's core generally covers carrying in public for self-defense.