Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-10-07036/USCOURTS-caDC-10-07036-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued November 15, 2010 Decided October 4, 2011

No. 10-7036

DICK ANTHONY HELLER, ET AL.,

APPELLANTS

v.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, ET AL.,

APPELLEES

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:08-cv-01289)

Stephen P. Halbrook argued the cause for appellants. 

With him on the briefs was Richard E. Gardiner.

William J. Olson, Herbert W. Titus, and John S. Miles

were on the brief for amici curiae Conservative Legal 

Defense and Education Fund, et al. in support of appellants.

Todd S. Kim, Solicitor General, Office of the Attorney 

General for the District of Columbia, argued the cause for 

appellees. With him on the brief were Peter J. Nickles, 

Attorney General, Donna M. Murasky, Deputy Solicitor 

General, and Holly M. Johnson, Assistant Attorney General.

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Matthew M. Shors was on the brief for amici curiae 

Professional Historians and Law Professors, et al. in support 

of appellees.

Paul R.Q. Wolfson, A. Stephen Hut, Jr., Joshua M. 

Salzman, and Jonathan E. Lowy were on the brief for amici 

curiae The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, et al. in 

support of appellees.

Before: GINSBURG, HENDERSON and KAVANAUGH, 

Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge GINSBURG.

I. Background 4

II. Analysis 8

A. Statutory Authority 9

B. The Second Amendment 12

1. The Heller Decision 12

2. The Constitutional Framework 13

3. Registration Requirements 15

a. Do the registration requirements impinge upon 

the Second Amendment right? 15

i. Basic registration requirements 15

ii. Novel registration requirements 19

b. Intermediate scrutiny is appropriate 20

c. Intermediate scrutiny requires remand 24

4. Assault Weapons and Large-Capacity Magazines 28

a. Do the prohibitions impinge upon the Second 

Amendment right? 29

b. Intermediate scrutiny is appropriate 31

c. The prohibitions survive intermediate scrutiny 33

III. Conclusion 36

 

 

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Appendix: Regarding the Dissent 36

A. Interpreting Heller and McDonald 36

B. Registration Requirements 42

C. Assault Weapons 42

Dissenting opinion filed by Circuit Judge KAVANAUGH.

GINSBURG, Circuit Judge: In June 2008 the Supreme 

Court held the District of Columbia laws restricting the 

possession of firearms in one’s home violated the Second 

Amendment right of individuals to keep and bear arms. See

District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570. In the wake of 

that decision, the District adopted the Firearms Registration 

Amendment Act of 2008 (FRA), D.C. Law 17-372, which 

amended the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, D.C. 

Law 1-85. The plaintiffs in the present case challenge, both 

facially and as applied to them, the provisions of the District’s 

gun laws, new and old, requiring the registration of firearms 

and prohibiting both the registration of “assault weapons” and 

the possession of magazines with a capacity of more than ten 

rounds of ammunition. The plaintiffs argue those provisions 

(1) are not within the District’s congressionally delegated 

legislative authority or, if they are, then they (2) violate the 

Second Amendment.

The district court granted summary judgment for the 

District and the plaintiffs appealed. We hold the District had 

the authority under D.C. law to promulgate the challenged 

gun laws, and we uphold as constitutional the prohibitions of 

assault weapons and of large-capacity magazines and some of 

the registration requirements. We remand the other 

registration requirements to the district court for further 

proceedings because the record is insufficient to inform our 

resolution of the important constitutional issues presented.

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I. Background

In Heller, the Supreme Court held the Second 

Amendment protects “an individual right to keep and bear 

arms,” 554 U.S. at 595, but not a right “to keep and carry any 

weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for 

whatever purpose,” id. at 626. More specifically, the Court 

held unconstitutional the District’s “ban on handgun 

possession in the home” as well as its “prohibition against 

rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the 

purpose of immediate self-defense,” id. at 635, noting “the 

inherent right of self-defense [is] central to the Second 

Amendment right,” id. at 628. Therefore, unless the plaintiff 

was “disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment 

rights” for some reason, such as a felony conviction, the 

District had to permit him to register his handgun. Id. at 635.

Shortly after the Supreme Court issued its decision in 

Heller, the D.C. Council passed emergency legislation in an 

effort to conform the District’s laws to the Supreme Court’s 

holding while it considered permanent legislation. The 

Council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary then 

held three public hearings on the subject. In December 2008, 

upon the Committee’s recommendation, the full Council 

passed the FRA. 56 D.C. Reg. 3438 (May 1, 2009).

The plaintiffs challenge a host of provisions of the new 

scheme for regulating firearms.*

 * Although the District revised its regulatory scheme, the ban on 

semi-automatic rifles and the registration scheme themselves are 

not entirely new. The District has banned all semi-automatic 

firearms shooting more than twelve shots without reloading and has 

required basic registration since 1932. See Act of July 8, 1932, ch. 

465, §§ 1, 8, 47 Stat. 650, 650, 652. It enacted most of its 

 First they object to the 

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general requirement that owners register their firearms, D.C. 

Code § 7-2502.01(a). In particular, the plaintiffs challenge 

the following requirements that apply each time a person 

applies to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) for a 

registration certificate. Each applicant must:

• Disclose certain information about himself — such 

as his name, address, and occupation — and about 

his firearm. § 7-2502.03(b).

• Submit “for a ballistics identification procedure” 

each pistol to be registered. § 7-2502.03(d). 

Ballistics testing is not required for long guns. See 

id.

• Appear in person and, at the MPD’s request, bring 

with him the firearm to be registered. § 7-

2502.04(c).

• Register no more than one pistol in a 30-day 

period. § 7-2502.03(e).

• Renew each registration certificate “3 years after 

the date of issuance.” § 7-2502.07a(a). In order to 

renew the certificate, the applicant must “submit a 

statement ... attesting to” his current address, 

possession of the firearm, and compliance with the 

registration requirements in § 7-2502.03(a). § 7-

2502.07a(c).

In addition, the plaintiffs challenge five requirements that 

are more similar to licensing the owner of the firearm than to 

 

comprehensive registration scheme in 1975. See Firearms Control 

Regulations Act of 1975, D.C. Law 1-85.

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registering the weapon itself.* Specifically, the applicant 

must:

• Have vision qualifying one for a driver’s license. 

§ 7-2502.03(a)(11).

• Demonstrate knowledge of the District’s laws 

pertaining to firearms “and, in particular, the safe 

and responsible use, handling, and storage of the 

same.” § 7-2502.03(a)(10).

• Submit to being fingerprinted and photographed. 

§ 7-2502.04; D.C. Mun. Regs. tit. 24, § 2312.1–2.

• Undergo a background check every six years to 

confirm his continuing compliance with the 

registration requirements in § 7-2502.03(a). § 7-

2502.07a(d).

• Attend a firearms training or safety course 

providing “a total of at least one hour of firing 

training at a firing range and a total of at least 4 

hours of classroom instruction.” § 7-

2502.03(a)(13)(A).

Second, the plaintiffs challenge the District’s prohibitions 

of “assault weapon[s],” D.C. Code § 7-2502.02(a)(6), and of 

 * The plaintiffs also challenge several administrative and 

enforcement provisions incidental to the underlying regime. See

D.C. Code §§ 7-2502.03(d), 7-2502.05(b), D.C. Mun. Regs. tit. 24, 

§ 2320 (fees for registration, ballistics testing, and fingerprinting); 

D.C. Code § 7-2507.06 (violation punishable by fine of up to 

$1,000, one year in prison, or both); § 7-2502.08 (registrant must 

notify MPD if firearm is transferred, lost, stolen, or destroyed, and 

exhibit registration certificate upon demand of MPD). These 

provisions are lawful insofar as the underlying regime is lawful and 

hence enforceable.

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magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition, § 7-

2506.01(b). The FRA defines “assault weapon” to include

certain brands and models of semi-automatic rifles, pistols, 

and shotguns, such as the Colt AR-15 series of rifles, as well 

as semi-automatic firearms with certain features, regardless of 

make and model, such as a semi-automatic rifle with a “pistol 

grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the 

weapon” or a “thumbhole stock.” § 7-2501.01(3A)(A). The 

District also prohibits possession of “any large capacity 

ammunition feeding device,” which includes “a magazine ... 

or similar device that has a capacity of ... more than 10 rounds 

of ammunition.” § 7-2506.01(b) (hereinafter “large-capacity 

magazines”).

Plaintiffs Mark Snyder and Absalom F. Jordan, Jr. 

complied with the registration requirements and successfully 

registered a rifle and a pistol respectively. Plaintiff Jordan, 

however, was unable to register two additional pistols due to 

the one-gun-per-30-days limit. Three of the plaintiffs, Dick 

Anthony Heller, William Carter, and Jordan applied to 

register semi-automatic rifles, but the MPD denied their 

applications because it found the firearms were prohibited 

“assault weapons.” Plaintiff Heller was also denied 

registration of a pistol because the magazine had a capacity of 

15 rounds.*

 * In their complaint, the plaintiffs challenge the constitutionality of 

the FRA insofar as it bans all “assault weapons,” including semiautomatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns. In their briefs, however, 

they recount no attempt to register a semi-automatic pistol or a 

semi-automatic shotgun of a kind prohibited by the District’s ban 

on assault weapons, nor do they mention such weapons in arguing 

the ban is unconstitutional. Accordingly, we take their challenge to 

the ban on assault weapons as referring only to the ban on semiautomatic rifles, as set out in D.C. Code §§ 7-2501.01(3A)(A)(i)(I) 

and (IV). See Summers v. Earth Island Inst., 129 S. Ct. 1142, 1149 

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Before the district court, the plaintiffs argued all D.C. 

gun laws are required by the Act of June 30, 1906, ch. 3932, 

34 Stat. 808, to be “usual and reasonable,” but contended the 

aforementioned provisions meet neither criterion or, if they 

do, then they violate the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights. 

The district court held the challenged laws do not exceed the 

District’s authority under local law because they are usual and 

reasonable police regulations within the meaning of the 1906 

Act. 698 F. Supp. 2d 179, 196–97 (2010). Then, addressing 

the constitutional challenge, the court determined “the 

registration requirements plainly implicate the core Second 

Amendment right” but, applying intermediate scrutiny, upheld 

the registration scheme in all respects. Id. at 190–93. The 

court also upheld the ban on assault weapons and largecapacity magazines on the ground that the bans “do not 

implicate the core Second Amendment right.” Id. at 195. 

Holding, in the alternative, the bans would survive 

intermediate scrutiny, id., the court granted summary 

judgment for the District, and the plaintiffs appealed.

II. Analysis

Pursuant to the principle of constitutional avoidance, we 

“resolve statutory questions at the outset where to do so might 

obviate the need to consider a constitutional issue.” United 

 

(2009) (standing doctrine “requires federal courts to satisfy 

themselves that the plaintiff has alleged such a personal stake in the 

outcome of the controversy as to warrant his invocation of federalcourt jurisdiction,” and the plaintiff “bears the burden of showing 

that he has standing for each type of relief sought” (internal 

quotation marks omitted)); Democratic Cent. Comm. v. Wash. 

Metro. Area Transit Comm’n, 485 F.2d 786, 790 n.16 (D.C. Cir. 

1973) (declining to consider claims because “[i]n their brief ... 

petitioners offer no argument whatever in support of these points”).

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States v. Wells Fargo Bank, 485 U.S. 351, 354 (1988). 

Accordingly, we consider first whether the D.C. Council had 

the statutory authority to enact the challenged gun laws.

A. Statutory Authority

The Congress in 1878 permanently established a Board 

of Commissioners, to which it delegated regulatory authority 

over the District in discrete areas of policy. Organic Act of 

June 11, 1878, ch. 180, 20 Stat. 102, 103; see also District of 

Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., 346 U.S. 100, 111 (1953) 

(under Organic Act, “municipal government was confined to 

mere administration” (internal quotation marks omitted)). 

The Congress passed the 1906 Act in part to grant the Board 

the specific authority to regulate firearms:

the Commissioners of the District of Columbia 

are hereby authorized and empowered to make 

and enforce all such usual and reasonable

police regulations ... as they may deem 

necessary for the regulation of firearms, 

projectiles, explosives, or weapons of any kind 

in the District of Columbia.

Act of June 30, 1906, ch. 3932, § 4, 34 Stat. 808, 809 

(emphasis added), amended and codified at D.C. Code § 1-

303.43 (referring to “Council” in lieu of “Commissioners”).

In 1973 the Congress passed the District of Columbia 

Home Rule Act (HRA), see District of Columbia SelfGovernment and Governmental Reorganization Act, Pub. L. 

No. 93-198, 87 Stat. 774 (codified as amended at D.C. Code 

§§ 1-201.01 et seq.), which remains in effect today. Section 

302 of the HRA, D.C. Code § 1-203.02, “Legislative Power,” 

provides in relevant part:

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Except as provided in [certain sections not 

relevant here], the legislative power of the 

District shall extend to all rightful subjects of 

legislation within the District consistent with 

the Constitution of the United States and the 

provisions of this [Act] .... 

The plaintiffs argue the District’s authority to regulate 

firearms remains limited by the 1906 Act, and that Act 

prevents the District from promulgating the gun laws 

challenged here. Specifically, the plaintiffs argue the D.C. 

gun laws are not “usual” because they are not commonly 

found in either state or federal law and they are also 

unreasonable. (They maintain the Eighth Amendment case 

law concerning what is “unusual” should inform our analysis 

of whether these laws are “usual.”) The District defends the 

challenged laws as both “usual and reasonable.” It argues a 

regulation is “usual” if any other jurisdiction has or has had a 

law addressing similar subject matter.

In any event the District argues, and the United States as 

amicus curiae agrees, its authority in the HRA over “all 

rightful subjects of legislation” affirmatively gives it the 

power to enact the challenged gun laws. The plaintiffs 

respond to that argument with the observation that the 1906 

Act should not be “deemed amended or repealed” because the 

HRA did not “specifically provide[]” for repeal and the 1906 

Act is not “inconsistent with” the HRA. See D.C. Code § 1-

207.17(b) (“No law or regulation which is in force on January 

2, 1975 shall be deemed amended or repealed by [the HRA] 

except to the extent specifically provided herein or to the 

extent that such law or regulation is inconsistent with this 

chapter”).

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We agree with the District that it was authorized to enact 

the challenged gun laws. The HRA granted the District broad

legislative power, subject to a few express exceptions, none of 

which is relevant here. See D.C. Code § 1-203.02; id. § 1-

204.04(a). The plaintiffs do not contend the District’s 

authority to enact these gun laws is limited by any other 

provision of the HRA, see Marijuana Policy Project v. United 

States, 304 F.3d 82, 83 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (HRA “lists certain 

matters that are not rightful subjects” of legislation, such as “a 

commuter tax on non-residents’ income”), and the District of 

Columbia Court of Appeals has authoritatively if more 

generally said as much, see Convention Ctr. Referendum 

Comm. v. D.C. Bd. of Elections & Ethics, 441 A.2d 889, 903 

(D.C. 1981) (en banc) (Council’s legislative power “limited 

only by specified exceptions and by the general requirement 

that legislation be consistent with the U.S. Constitution and 

the Home Rule Act”). See also John R. Thompson Co., 346 

U.S. at 104–05, 110 (concluding Organic Act of February 21, 

1871, 16 Stat. 419, which gave District power over “all 

rightful subjects of legislation,” conferred authority “as broad 

as the police power of a state”). Hence we conclude the grant 

of authority in the HRA comprises the subject of firearms and 

supersedes the qualified grant to the District in the 1906 Act.

Insofar as the 1906 Act remains effective, it serves only 

to clarify that the new D.C. Council is the body responsible 

for the “function” of regulating firearms, as stated in D.C. 

Code § 1-303.43. Specifically, § 404(a) of the HRA provides

all functions granted to or imposed upon, or 

vested in or transferred to the District of 

Columbia Council, as established by 

Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1967, shall be 

carried out by the Council in accordance with 

the provisions of this chapter.

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D.C. Code § 1-204.04(a). Accordingly, we need not decide 

whether the laws at issue are “usual and reasonable” because 

we hold the District has authority under the HRA to enact 

laws regulating firearms.

B. The Second Amendment

Having determined the District had the statutory authority 

to promulgate the challenged gun laws, we next consider 

whether those laws are consistent with the Second 

Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the 

security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and 

bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” To determine how we are 

to approach this question, we begin with Heller.

1. The Heller Decision

In Heller the Supreme Court explained the Second 

Amendment “codified a pre-existing” individual right to keep 

and bear arms, 554 U.S. at 592, which was important to 

Americans not only to maintain the militia, but also for selfdefense and hunting, id. at 599. Although “self-defense had 

little to do with the right’s codification[,] it was the central 

component of the right itself.” Id.

Still, the Court made clear “the right secured by the 

Second Amendment is not unlimited,” id. at 626, and it gave 

some examples to illustrate the boundaries of that right. For 

instance, the Court noted “the Second Amendment does not 

protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding 

citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.” 

Id. at 625 (citing United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 

(1939)). This limitation upon the right to keep and bear arms 

was “supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the 

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carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.” Id. at 627 

(internal quotation marks omitted).

The Court identified other historical limitations upon the 

scope of the right protected by the Second Amendment. For 

example, it noted “the majority of the 19th-century courts to 

consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying 

concealed weapons were lawful under the Second 

Amendment or state analogues.” Id. at 626. It also provided 

a list of some “presumptively lawful regulatory measures”:

nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast 

doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the 

possession of firearms by felons and the 

mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of 

firearms in sensitive places such as schools and 

government buildings, or laws imposing 

conditions and qualifications on the commercial 

sale of arms. 

Id. at 626–27 & n.26. The Court made clear, however, it was 

not “undertak[ing] an exhaustive historical analysis today of 

the full scope of the Second Amendment.” Id. at 626.

2. The Constitutional Framework

Under Heller, therefore, there are certain types of 

firearms regulations that do not govern conduct within the 

scope of the Amendment. We accordingly adopt, as have 

other circuits, a two-step approach to determining the 

constitutionality of the District’s gun laws. Ezell v. City of 

Chicago, No. 10-3525, 2011 WL 2623511, at *12–13 (7th 

Cir. July 6, 2011); United States v. Chester, 628 F.3d 673, 

680 (4th Cir. 2010); United States v. Reese, 627 F.3d 792, 

800–01 (10th Cir. 2010); United States v. Marzzarella, 614 

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F.3d 85, 89 (3d Cir. 2010). We ask first whether a particular 

provision impinges upon a right protected by the Second 

Amendment; if it does, then we go on to determine whether 

the provision passes muster under the appropriate level of 

constitutional scrutiny. See Ezell, 2011 WL 2623511, at *12–

13; Chester, 628 F.3d at 680; Reese, 627 F.3d at 800–01;

Marzzarella, 614 F.3d at 89; see also Nordyke v. King, 644 

F.3d 776, 786 (9th Cir. 2011) (“only regulations which 

substantially burden the right to keep and to bear arms trigger 

heightened scrutiny under the Second Amendment”). As 

explained below, and again in keeping with other circuits, we 

think that insofar as the laws at issue here do impinge upon a 

Second Amendment right, they warrant intermediate rather 

than strict scrutiny.

With respect to the first step, Heller tells us 

“longstanding” regulations are “presumptively lawful,” 554 

U.S. at 626–27 & n.26; that is, they are presumed not to 

burden conduct within the scope of the Second Amendment. 

See McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3047 

(2010) (Heller “did not cast doubt on [certain types of] 

longstanding regulatory measures”); Chester, 628 F.3d at 679 

(Heller “acknowledged that the scope of the Second 

Amendment is subject to historical limitations”); Marzzarella, 

614 F.3d at 91 (Heller indicates “longstanding limitations are 

exceptions to the right to bear arms”); United States v. Rene 

E., 583 F.3d 8, 12 (1st Cir. 2009) (Heller “identified limits” of 

the Second Amendment based upon “various historical 

restrictions on possessing and carrying weapons”). This is a 

reasonable presumption because a regulation that is 

“longstanding,” which necessarily means it has long been 

accepted by the public, is not likely to burden a constitutional 

right; concomitantly the activities covered by a longstanding 

regulation are presumptively not protected from regulation by 

the Second Amendment. A plaintiff may rebut this 

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presumption by showing the regulation does have more than a 

de minimis effect upon his right. A requirement of newer 

vintage is not, however, presumed to be valid.

3. Registration Requirements

To apply this analytical framework, we first consider 

whether each of the challenged registration requirements 

impinges upon the right protected by the Second Amendment. 

We uphold the requirement of mere registration because it is 

longstanding, hence “presumptively lawful,” and the 

presumption stands unrebutted. Other registration 

requirements we remand to the district court, as explained 

below, for further proceedings.

a. Do the registration requirements impinge upon 

the Second Amendment right?

The plaintiffs argue the registration requirements are not 

longstanding and therefore not presumptively lawful, and in 

fact impermissibly burden the right protected by the Second 

Amendment. The District responds that registration 

requirements have been accepted throughout our history, are 

not overly burdensome, and therefore do not affect the right 

protected by the Second Amendment.

i. Basic registration requirements 

The record supports the view that basic registration of 

handguns is deeply enough rooted in our history to support 

the presumption that a registration requirement is 

constitutional. The Court in Heller considered “prohibitions 

on the possession of firearms by felons” to be “longstanding” 

although states did not start to enact them until the early 20th 

century. See C. Kevin Marshall, Why Can’t Martha Stewart 

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Have a Gun?, 32 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 695, 708 (2009) 

(noting “ban on convicts possessing firearms were unknown 

before World War I” and “compilation of laws in mid-1925 

indicated that no State banned possession of long guns based 

on a prior conviction; that only six banned possession of 

concealable weapons on such basis; that, except for New 

York, ... even those laws dated from 1923 or later”). At just 

about the same time, states and localities began to require 

registration of handguns. 

Registration typically required that a person provide to 

the local Government a modicum of information about the 

registrant and his firearm. A 1911 New York statute 

delegated the record keeping function to sellers of concealable 

firearms, requiring them to “keep a register” recording the 

“date of sale, name, age, occupation and residence of every 

purchaser of such a [firearm], together with the calibre, make, 

model, manufacturer’s number or other mark of identification 

on such [firearm],” which register had to be “open at all 

reasonable hours for the inspection of any peace officer.” Act 

of May 25, 1911, ch. 195, § 2, 1911 N.Y. Laws 444–45. 

Similar laws had already been enacted by Illinois, Act of Apr. 

16, 1881, ¶ 90, and Georgia, Act of Aug. 12, 1910, No. 432, § 

2, 1910 Ga. Laws 134, 135 (official who grants license to 

carry pistol or revolver “shall keep a record of the name of the 

person taking out such license, the name of the maker of the 

fire-arm to be carried, and the caliber and number of the 

same”). Other states were soon to do so. See Oregon, Act of 

Feb. 21, 1917, ch. 377, 1917 Or. Laws 804, 805–06; 

Michigan, Act of June 2, 1927, No. 372, § 9, 1927 Mich. 

Laws 887, 891 (“any person within this state who owns or has 

in his possession a pistol” must “present such weapon for 

safety inspection to the commissioner or chief of police .... A 

certificate of inspection shall thereupon be issued ... and kept 

as a permanent official record for a period of six years”). In 

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1917 California likewise required the purchaser of a 

concealable firearm to give the seller basic information about 

himself, including his name, address, occupation, physical 

description (height and color of skin, eyes, and hair), and 

about the weapon (caliber, make, model, number). Act of 

May 4, 1917, ch. 145, § 7, 1917 Cal. Laws 221, 222–23. 

Hawaii did the same in 1927, while still a territory, Small 

Arms Act, Act 206, § 9, 1927 Haw. Laws 209, 211, as did the 

Congress for the District of Columbia in 1932, see Act of July 

8, 1932, ch. 465, § 8, 47 Stat. 650, 652.

In sum, the basic requirement to register a handgun is 

longstanding in American law, accepted for a century in 

diverse states and cities and now applicable to more than one 

fourth of the Nation by population.* 

 * Today seven states require registration of some or all firearms, 

including Hawaii, Haw. Rev. Stat. § 134-3(a), (b), (e) (registration 

of all firearms); California, Cal. Penal Code § 11106(c) 

(registration for sales of handguns); Michigan, Mich. Comp. Laws 

§ 28.422(5) (purchaser must provide information to obtain 

“license” for each pistol); New Jersey, N.J. Rev. Stat. 2C:58-12 

(registration of assault firearms); Louisiana, La. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 

40:1783 (registration of firearms); Maryland, Md. Code Ann., 

Crim. Law § 4-303 (registration of pre-ban assault pistols); and 

Connecticut, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-202d(a) (registration of pre-ban 

assault weapons); as do some cities and counties, including 

Chicago, Municipal Code §§ 8-20-140 et seq. (registration of all 

firearms); New York City, Admin. Code, §§ 10-304(a), (f) 

(registration of rifles and shotguns); Las Vegas, Mun. Code § 

10.66.140 (registration of handguns); Omaha, Mun. Code § 20-251 

(registration of “any concealable firearm”); Cleveland, Offenses & 

Bus. Activities Code §§ 674.02, 674.05 (registration card required 

for each handgun) (but preempted by Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 

9.68(A)); and Clark County, Nevada, Code § 12.04.110 

(registration of handguns). Moreover, several states require sellers 

to report to law enforcement information about firearm sales 

Therefore, we presume 

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the District’s basic registration requirement, D.C. Code § 7-

2502.01(a), including the submission of certain information, § 

7-2502.03(b), does not impinge upon the right protected by 

the Second Amendment. Further, we find no basis in either 

the historical record or the record of this case to rebut that 

presumption. Indeed, basic registration requirements are selfevidently de minimis, for they are similar to other common 

registration or licensing schemes, such as those for voting or 

for driving a car, that cannot reasonably be considered 

onerous. Cf. Rosario v. Rockefeller, 410 U.S. 753, 754–58 

(1973) (law “requir[ing] a voter to enroll in the party of his 

choice at least 30 days before the general election in 

November in order to vote in the next subsequent party 

primary” does not violate First and Fourteenth Amendments 

because “if [the petitioners’] plight [could] be characterized as 

disenfranchisement at all, it was not caused by [the law], but 

by their own failure to take timely steps to effect their 

enrollment”); id. at 760 (“the State is certainly justified in 

imposing some reasonable cutoff point for registration or 

party enrollment, which citizens must meet in order to 

participate in the next election”); Justice v. Town of Cicero, 

577 F.3d 768, 773–74 (7th Cir. 2009) (“ordinance requiring 

the registration of all firearms ... appears to be consistent with 

the ruling in Heller”). These early registration requirements, 

however, applied with only a few exceptions solely to 

handguns — that is, pistols and revolvers — and not to long 

guns. Consequently, we hold the basic registration 

requirements are constitutional only as applied to handguns. 

With respect to long guns they are novel, not historic.

 

identifying the purchaser and the firearm. See Legal Cmty. Against 

Violence, Regulating Guns in America: An Evaluation and 

Comparative Analysis of Federal, State, and Selected Local Guns 

Laws, 253 (Feb. 2008), http://www.lcav.org/publicationsbriefs/reports_analyses/RegGuns.entire.report.pdf (identifying ten 

states).

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ii. Novel registration requirements

Several other of the District’s registration requirements 

are not longstanding, including the ballistics-identification 

provision, D.C. Code § 7-2502.03(d), the one-pistol-per-30-

days rule, § 7-2502.03(e), and the requirements that 

applicants appear in person, § 7-2502.04(c), and re-register 

each firearm after three years, §§ 7-2502.07a(a)–(c). Certain 

portions of the law that are more akin to licensing the gun 

owner than to registering the gun are also novel; these include 

the requirement that an applicant demonstrate knowledge 

about firearms, § 7-2502.03(a)(10), be fingerprinted and 

photographed, §§ 7-2502.04(a)–(b), take a firearms training or 

safety course, § 7-2502.03(a)(13)(A), meet a vision 

requirement, § 7-2502.03(a)(11), and submit to a background 

check every six years, § 7-2502.07a(d).*

The requirements that are not longstanding, which 

include, in addition to those listed in the prior paragraph, all

the requirements as applied to long guns, also affect the 

Second Amendment right because they are not de minimis.**

 * Although some types of licensure have been required by some 

states since the early 20th century, see, e.g., Act of Apr. 6, 1909, ch. 

114, § 3, 1909 N.H. Laws 451, 451–52 (license “to carry a loaded 

pistol or revolver”); Small Arms Act, Act 206, §§ 5, 7, 1927 Haw. 

Laws 209, 209–11 (license to carry a pistol or revolver outside the 

home), the District’s particular requirements are novel, not 

longstanding.

 

** The requirement of basic registration as applied to long guns may 

also be de minimis. For now, however, we assume this 

requirement, too, impinges upon the Second Amendment right 

because, as we discuss below, the record is devoid of information 

concerning the application of registration requirements to long 

guns. On remand and with the benefit of additional evidence, the 

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20

All of these requirements, such as the mandatory five hours of 

firearm training and instruction, § 7-2502.03(a)(13)(A), make 

it considerably more difficult for a person lawfully to acquire 

and keep a firearm, including a handgun, for the purpose of 

self-defense in the home — the “core lawful purpose” 

protected by the Second Amendment, Heller, 554 U.S. at 630. 

Because they impinge upon that right, we must determine 

whether these requirements are constitutional.*

 In order to do 

that, however, we must first determine the degree of scrutiny 

to which they are appropriately subject.

b. Intermediate scrutiny is appropriate

The plaintiffs argue strict scrutiny is the appropriate 

standard of review because, in holding the Fourteenth 

Amendment made the Second Amendment applicable to the 

States, the Court in McDonald described the right “to keep 

and bear arms [as] among those fundamental rights necessary 

to our system of ordered liberty,” 130 S. Ct. at 3042. The 

District responds that strict scrutiny would be inappropriate 

because, among other reasons, the right to keep and carry 

arms has always been heavily regulated; it argues we should 

 

district court will be better able to address this question in the first 

instance.

* We note that some of the plaintiffs’ arguments — in particular 

with respect to the provisions requiring registrants to demonstrate 

knowledge about firearms, meet a vision standard, and take a 

training course — are so cursory we might, in other circumstances, 

consider them forfeit. See United States v. Law, 528 F.3d 888, 908 

n.11 (D.C. Cir. 2008) (appellant’s argument forfeited “because he 

failed to develop it”). As we will in any event be remanding other 

registration requirements to the district court, however, see Part 

II.B.3.c, we see no reason to foreclose these particular plaintiffs 

from fleshing out their arguments as well as supplementing the 

record, if they can.

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21

adopt a “reasonable-regulation test.” The plaintiffs, in turn, 

contend Heller forecloses a “reasonableness” test.

Heller clearly does reject any kind of “rational basis” or 

reasonableness test, see 554 U.S. at 628 n.27, but it leaves 

open the question what level of scrutiny we are to apply to 

laws regulating firearms. True, the Supreme Court often 

applies strict scrutiny to legislation that impinges upon a 

fundamental right. See, e.g., Clark v. Jeter, 486 U.S. 456, 461 

(1988) (“classifications affecting fundamental rights are given 

the most exacting scrutiny” (citation omitted)). In applying 

strict scrutiny, the Court requires the Government to prove its 

law “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to 

achieve that interest.” Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876, 

898 (2010) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court has 

not said, however, and it does not logically follow, that strict 

scrutiny is called for whenever a fundamental right is at stake. 

See, e.g., Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 791 

(1989) (applying intermediate scrutiny to restrictions on 

“time, place, or manner of protected speech”); Marzzarella, 

614 F.3d at 96 (“Strict scrutiny does not apply automatically 

any time an enumerated right is involved”); Chester, 628 F.3d 

at 682 (“We do not apply strict scrutiny whenever a law 

impinges upon a right specifically enumerated in the Bill of 

Rights”); Adam Winkler, Scrutinizing the Second 

Amendment, 105 Mich. L. Rev. 683, 697–98, 700 (2007) 

(“mere fact of ‘fundamentality’ does not answer the question 

of what would be the appropriate standard of review for the 

right to bear arms” as “many of the individual rights in the 

Bill of Rights do not trigger strict scrutiny, including many 

that are incorporated,” and “[e]ven among those incorporated 

rights that do prompt strict scrutiny, such as the freedom of 

speech and of religion, strict scrutiny is only occasionally 

applied”). Cf. Mills v. Habluetzel, 456 U.S. 91, 98–99 (1982) 

(disabilities attendant to illegitimacy are constitutional “to the 

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22

extent they are substantially related to a legitimate state 

interest”); Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190, 197 (1976) 

(“classifications by gender must serve important 

governmental objectives and must be substantially related to 

achievement of those objectives”).

As with the First Amendment, the level of scrutiny 

applicable under the Second Amendment surely “depends on 

the nature of the conduct being regulated and the degree to 

which the challenged law burdens the right.” Chester, 628 

F.3d at 682; see also Turner Broad. Sys., Inc. v. FCC (Turner 

I), 512 U.S. 622, 642 (1994) (“regulations that are unrelated 

to the content of speech are subject to an intermediate level of 

scrutiny because in most cases they pose a less substantial risk 

of excising certain ideas or viewpoints from the public 

dialogue” (citation omitted)); Zauderer v. Office of 

Disciplinary Counsel of Supreme Court of Ohio, 471 U.S. 

626, 651 (1985) (“We recognize that unjustified or unduly 

burdensome disclosure requirements might offend the First 

Amendment by chilling protected commercial speech. But 

we hold that an advertiser’s rights are adequately protected as 

long as disclosure requirements are reasonably related to the 

State’s interest in preventing deception of consumers.”); 

Nelson Lund, The Second Amendment, Heller, and Originalist 

Jurisprudence, 56 UCLA L. Rev. 1343, 1376 (2009) (“The 

case law dealing with free speech and the free exercise of 

religion provides a particularly good analogue” for Second 

Amendment). That is, a regulation that imposes a substantial 

burden upon the core right of self-defense protected by the 

Second Amendment must have a strong justification, whereas 

a regulation that imposes a less substantial burden should be 

proportionately easier to justify. See Turner I, 512 U.S. at 

661 (“must-carry provisions do not pose such inherent 

dangers to free expression ... as to justify application of the 

most exacting level of First Amendment scrutiny”; rather, 

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23

“the appropriate standard ... is the intermediate level of 

scrutiny applicable to content-neutral restrictions that impose 

an incidental burden on speech”); Board of Trustees of State 

Univ. of N.Y. v. Fox, 492 U.S. 469, 477 (1989) (“commercial 

speech [enjoys] a limited measure of protection, 

commensurate with its subordinate position in the scale of 

First Amendment values” (internal quotation marks omitted)); 

Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 44–45 (1976) (“expenditure 

limitations” are subject to “exacting scrutiny applicable to 

limitations on core First Amendment rights of political 

expression” because they impose a “great[] burden on basic 

freedoms”); Ezell, 2011 WL 2623511, at *13 (level of 

scrutiny “will depend on how close the law comes to the core 

of the Second Amendment right and the severity of the law’s 

burden on the right”); see also Eugene Volokh, Implementing 

the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Self-Defense: An 

Analytical Framework and a Research Agenda, 56 UCLA L. 

Rev. 1443, 1471 (2009) (“Ballot access regulations are ... 

subject to strict scrutiny if they ‘impose a severe burden on 

associational rights,’ but to a much weaker level of scrutiny if 

they ‘impose[] only modest burdens’” (quoting Wash. State 

Grange v. Wash. State Republican Party, 128 S. Ct. 1184, 

1191–92 (2008))); Winkler, supra, at 698 (“Strict scrutiny ... 

does not apply to fundamental, preferred rights when the 

courts determine that the underlying burden is only 

incidental”).

As between strict and intermediate scrutiny, we conclude 

the latter is the more appropriate standard for review of gun 

registration laws. As the Third Circuit reasoned in 

Marzzarella with regard to a prohibition on possession of a 

firearm with the serial numbers obliterated, registration 

requirements “do[] not severely limit the possession of 

firearms.” 614 F.3d at 97. Indeed, none of the District’s 

registration requirements prevents an individual from 

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24

possessing a firearm in his home or elsewhere, whether for 

self-defense or hunting, or any other lawful purpose.

c. Intermediate scrutiny requires remand

As for the novel registration requirements, to pass muster 

under intermediate scrutiny the District must show they are 

“substantially related to an important governmental 

objective.” Clark, 486 U.S. at 461; see also United States v. 

Williams, 616 F.3d 685, 692–94 (7th Cir. 2010) (prohibition 

of firearm possession by felons survives intermediate 

scrutiny). That is, the District must establish a tight “fit”

between the registration requirements and an important or 

substantial governmental interest, a fit “that employs not 

necessarily the least restrictive means but ... a means narrowly 

tailored to achieve the desired objective.” Fox, 492 U.S. at 

480; see also Ward, 491 U.S. at 782–83 (“The requirement of 

narrow tailoring is satisfied so long as the regulation promotes 

a substantial governmental interest that would be achieved 

less effectively absent the regulation, and the means chosen 

are not substantially broader than necessary to achieve that 

interest”). We think the District has advanced, albeit 

incompletely — almost cursorily — articulated, two 

important governmental interests it may have in the 

registration requirements, viz., to protect police officers and to 

aid in crime control. Cf. United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 

739, 750 (1987) (“the Government’s general interest in 

preventing crime is compelling”). The Council Committee on 

Public Safety explained: “Registration is critical because it ... 

allows officers to determine in advance whether individuals 

involved in a call may have firearms ... [and] assists law 

enforcement in determining whether registered owners are 

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eligible to possess firearms or have fallen into a prohibited 

class.”*

 Report on Bill 17-843, at 3–4 (Nov. 25, 2008).

We cannot conclude, however, that the novel registration 

requirements — or any registration requirement as applied to 

long guns — survive intermediate scrutiny based upon the 

record as it stands because the District has not demonstrated a 

close fit between those requirements and its governmental 

interests. In support of the registration requirements, the 

District relies upon the Committee Report on the FRA, along 

with testimony and written statements submitted to the 

Committee at public hearings. Even so, the record is 

inadequate for us confidently to hold the registration 

requirements are narrowly tailored.

For example, the Committee Report asserts “studies 

show” that “laws restricting multiple purchases or sales of 

firearms are designed to reduce the number of guns entering 

the illegal market and to stem the flow of firearms between 

states,” and that “handguns sold in multiple sales to the same 

individual purchaser are frequently used in crime.” Id. at 10. 

The Report neither identifies the studies relied upon nor 

claims those studies showed the laws achieved their purpose, 

 * On remand, the District will have an opportunity to explain in 

greater detail how these governmental interests are served by the 

novel registration requirements. The Committee also thought 

registration useful because it “gives law enforcement essential 

information about firearm ownership, ... permits officers to charge 

individuals with a crime if an individual is in possession of an 

unregistered firearm, and permits officers to seize unregistered 

weapons.” Report on Bill 17-843, at 3–4 (Nov. 25, 2008). These 

rationales are circular, however, and do not on their own establish 

either an important interest of the Government or a substantial 

relationship between the registration of firearms and an important 

interest.

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nor in any other way attempts to justify requiring a person 

who registered a pistol to wait 30 days to register another one. 

The record does include testimony that offers cursory 

rationales for some other requirements, such as safety training 

and demonstrating knowledge of gun laws, see, e.g., 

Testimony of Cathy L. Lanier, Chief of Police, at 2 (Oct. 1, 

2008), but the District fails to present any data or other 

evidence to substantiate its claim that these requirements can 

reasonably be expected to promote either of the important 

governmental interests it has invoked (perhaps because it was 

relying upon the asserted interests we have discounted as 

circular).

Although we do “accord substantial deference to the 

predictive judgments” of the legislature, Turner Broad. Sys., 

Inc. v. FCC (Turner II), 520 U.S. 180, 195 (1997) (quoting 

Turner I, 512 U.S. at 665) (internal quotation marks omitted), 

the District is not thereby “insulated from meaningful judicial

review,” Turner I, 512 U.S. at 666 (controlling opinion of 

Kennedy, J.); see also City of Los Angeles v. Alameda Books, 

Inc., 535 U.S. 425, 440 (2002) (plurality opinion) (citing 

Turner I and “acknowledg[ing] that the Los Angeles City 

Council is in a better position than the Judiciary to gather and 

evaluate data on local problems”). Rather, we must “assure 

that, in formulating its judgments, [the legislature] has drawn 

reasonable inferences based on substantial evidence.” Turner

II, 520 U.S. at 195 (quoting Turner I, 512 U.S. at 666) 

(internal quotation marks omitted). Therefore, the District 

needs to present some meaningful evidence, not mere 

assertions, to justify its predictive judgments. On the present 

record, we conclude the District has not supplied evidence 

adequate to show a substantial relationship between any of the 

novel registration requirements and an important 

governmental interest.

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Nor, however, do the plaintiffs present more meaningful 

contrary evidence concerning handguns, and neither the 

District nor the plaintiffs present any evidence at all 

concerning application of the registration requirements to 

long guns. The parties’ mutual failure in their briefs to 

distinguish between handguns and long guns points up a 

significant deficiency in the present record.*

 The Committee 

Report implicitly acknowledged the distinction between 

handguns and long guns only back-handedly, quoting Heller

to emphasize specifically “the problem of handgun violence 

in this country” before discussing the proposed FRA. Report 

on Bill 17-843, at 3 (Nov. 25, 2008). Handguns indeed 

appear to have been the exclusive subject of the Committee’s 

concern. Nowhere in the Report is there even a single 

reference to the need for registration of rifles or shotguns. For 

all the legislative record and the record in this case reveal, the 

provisions of the FRA that deal specifically with registration 

of long guns might have been written in invisible ink.

In the light of these evidentiary deficiencies and “the 

importance of the issues” at stake in this case, taking our cue 

from the Supreme Court in Turner I, we believe the parties 

should have an opportunity “to develop a more thorough 

factual record.” 512 U.S. at 664–68 (controlling opinion of 

Kennedy, J.). In Turner I, the Court had determined 

intermediate scrutiny was appropriate for the First 

Amendment challenge at issue. “On the state of the record 

developed [that] far,” however, the Government was unable to 

show the law was narrowly tailored. Id. at 665. Rather than 

invalidate a legislative judgment based upon that 

 * While the Court in Heller observed that the handgun is “the 

quintessential self-defense weapon,” 554 U.S. at 629, a rifle or 

shotgun is the firearm of choice for hunting, which activity Heller

recognized as providing one basis for the right to keep and bear 

arms, albeit not the central one, id. at 599.

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shortcoming, the Court remanded the case for development of 

“a more thorough factual record.” Id. at 668. We follow suit 

by remanding the novel registration requirements, and all 

registration requirements as applied to long guns, to the 

district court for further evidentiary proceedings.

4. Assault Weapons and Large-Capacity Magazines

Because the plaintiffs fail to present an argument in their 

briefs questioning the constitutionality of the ban on semiautomatic pistols and shotguns, see page 7 footnote * above, 

we construe the plaintiffs’ challenge to the ban on assault 

weapons as going only to the prohibition of certain semiautomatic rifles. We are not aware of evidence that 

prohibitions on either semi-automatic rifles or large-capacity 

magazines are longstanding and thereby deserving of a 

presumption of validity.* For the court to determine whether 

these prohibitions are constitutional, therefore, we first must 

ask whether they impinge upon the right protected by the 

Second Amendment. That is, prohibiting certain arms might 

not meaningfully affect “individual self-defense, [which] is 

‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.” 

McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3036 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 

599). Of course, the Court also said the Second Amendment 

protects the right to keep and bear arms for other “lawful 

purposes,” such as hunting, but self-defense is the “core 

lawful purpose” protected, Heller, 554 U.S. at 630.

 * We know of only two exceptions: the Act of July 8, 1932, ch. 465, 

§§ 1, 8, 47 Stat. 650, 650, 652, in which the Congress banned in 

D.C. “any firearm which shoots ... semiautomatically more than 

twelve shots without reloading,” and the Act of June 2, 1927, No. 

372, § 3, 1927 Mich. Laws 887, 888, which prohibited the 

possession of any “firearm which can be fired more than sixteen 

times without reloading.”

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The Court in Heller, as mentioned above at pages 12–13, 

recognized yet another “limitation on the right to keep and 

carry arms,” namely that the “sorts of weapons protected” are 

those “‘in common use at the time’ for lawful purposes like 

self-defense.” Id. at 624, 627. The Court found this 

limitation “fairly supported by the historical tradition of 

prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual 

weapons.’” Id. at 627. Because the prohibitions at issue, 

unlike the registration requirements, apply only to particular 

classes of weapons, we must also ask whether the prohibited 

weapons are “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for 

lawful purposes,” id. at 625; if not, then they are not the sorts 

of “Arms” protected by the Second Amendment.

a. Do the prohibitions impinge upon the Second 

Amendment right?

The plaintiffs contend semi-automatic rifles, in particular 

the AR variants, are commonly possessed for self-protection 

in the home as well as for sport. They also argue magazines 

holding more than ten rounds are commonly possessed for 

self-defense and for other lawful purposes and that the 

prohibition of such magazines would impose a burden upon 

them. Specifically, they point out that without a largecapacity magazine it would be necessary, in a stressful 

situation, to pause in order to reload the firearm.

The District, by contrast, argues neither assault weapons 

nor weapons with large-capacity magazines are among the 

“Arms” protected by the Second Amendment because they 

are both “dangerous and unusual,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 627 

(internal quotation marks omitted), and because prohibiting 

them minimally burdens the plaintiffs; hence the District 

maintains the bans are constitutional. The Committee on 

Public Safety received evidence that assault weapons are not 

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useful for the purposes of sporting or self-defense, but rather 

are “military-style” weapons designed for offensive use. See 

generally Testimony of Brian J. Siebel, Brady Center to 

Prevent Gun Violence (Oct. 1, 2008). The Committee 

concluded assault weapons “have no legitimate use as selfdefense weapons, and would in fact increase the danger to 

law-abiding users and innocent bystanders if kept in the home 

or used in self-defense situations.” Report on Bill 17-843, at 

7 (Nov. 25, 2008).

The District likewise contends magazines holding more 

than ten rounds are disproportionately involved in the murder 

of law enforcement officers and in mass shootings, and have 

little value for self-defense or sport. It cites the Siebel 

testimony, which relies upon a report of the federal Bureau of 

Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) stating

that semi-automatic rifles with large-capacity magazines are 

not suitable for sporting purposes. The District also reasons 

that the usefulness of large-capacity magazines for selfdefense in rare circumstances does not mean the burden 

imposed upon the plaintiffs is more than minimal.

We think it clear enough in the record that semiautomatic rifles and magazines holding more than ten rounds 

are indeed in “common use,” as the plaintiffs contend. 

Approximately 1.6 million AR-15s alone have been 

manufactured since 1986, and in 2007 this one popular model 

accounted for 5.5 percent of all firearms, and 14.4 percent of 

all rifles, produced in the U.S. for the domestic market. As

for magazines, fully 18 percent of all firearms owned by 

civilians in 1994 were equipped with magazines holding more 

than ten rounds, and approximately 4.7 million more such 

magazines were imported into the United States between 1995 

and 2000. There may well be some capacity above which 

magazines are not in common use but, if so, the record is 

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devoid of evidence as to what that capacity is; in any event, 

that capacity surely is not ten. 

Nevertheless, based upon the record as it stands, we 

cannot be certain whether these weapons are commonly used 

or are useful specifically for self-defense or hunting and 

therefore whether the prohibitions of certain semi-automatic 

rifles and magazines holding more than ten rounds 

meaningfully affect the right to keep and bear arms. We need 

not resolve that question, however, because even assuming 

they do impinge upon the right protected by the Second 

Amendment, we think intermediate scrutiny is the appropriate 

standard of review and the prohibitions survive that standard.

b. Intermediate scrutiny is appropriate

As we did in evaluating the constitutionality of certain of 

the registration requirements, we determine the appropriate 

standard of review by assessing how severely the prohibitions 

burden the Second Amendment right. Unlike the law held 

unconstitutional in Heller, the laws at issue here do not 

prohibit the possession of “the quintessential self-defense 

weapon,” to wit, the handgun. 554 U.S. at 629. Nor does the 

ban on certain semi-automatic rifles prevent a person from 

keeping a suitable and commonly used weapon for protection 

in the home or for hunting, whether a handgun or a nonautomatic long gun. See Gary Kleck & Marc Gertz, Armed 

Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of SelfDefense with a Gun, 86 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 150, 185 

(1995) (revolvers and semi-automatic pistols are together 

used almost 80% of the time in incidents of self-defense with 

a gun); Dep’t of Treasury, Study on the Sporting Suitability of 

Modified Semiautomatic Assault Rifles 38 (1998) (semiautomatic assault rifles studied are “not generally recognized 

as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting 

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purposes”). Although we cannot be confident the prohibitions 

impinge at all upon the core right protected by the Second 

Amendment, we are reasonably certain the prohibitions do not 

impose a substantial burden upon that right. As the District 

points out, the plaintiffs present hardly any evidence that 

semi-automatic rifles and magazines holding more than ten 

rounds are well-suited to or preferred for the purpose of selfdefense or sport. Cf. Kleck & Gertz, supra, at 177 (finding 

that of 340,000 to 400,000 instances of defensive gun use in 

which the defenders believed the use of a gun had saved a 

life, 240,000 to 300,000 involved handguns). Accordingly, 

we believe intermediate rather than strict scrutiny is the 

appropriate standard of review.

In this we agree with the reasoning of the Third Circuit in 

Marzzarella. The court there applied intermediate scrutiny to 

the prohibition of unmarked firearms in part because it 

thought the ban was similar to a regulation “of the manner in 

which ... speech takes place,” a type of regulation subject to 

intermediate scrutiny “under the time, place, and manner 

doctrine” of the First Amendment. 614 F.3d at 97. Notably, 

because the prohibition left a person “free to possess any 

otherwise lawful firearm,” the court reasoned it was “more 

accurately characterized as a regulation of the manner in 

which persons may lawfully exercise their Second 

Amendment rights.” Id. Here, too, the prohibition of semiautomatic rifles and large-capacity magazines does not 

effectively disarm individuals or substantially affect their 

ability to defend themselves. See Volokh, supra, at 1471 

(“where content-neutral speech restrictions are involved, 

restrictions that impose severe burdens (because they don’t 

leave open ample alternative channels) must be judged under 

strict scrutiny, but restrictions that impose only modest 

burdens (because they do leave open ample alternative 

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33

channels) are judged under a mild form of intermediate 

scrutiny”).

c. The prohibitions survive intermediate scrutiny

Recall that when subject to intermediate scrutiny the 

Government has the burden of showing there is a substantial 

relationship or reasonable “fit” between, on the one hand, the 

prohibition on assault weapons and magazines holding more 

than ten rounds and, on the other, its important interests in 

protecting police officers and controlling crime. The record 

evidence substantiates that the District’s prohibition is 

substantially related to those ends.

The Committee on Public Safety relied upon a report by 

the ATF, which described assault weapons as creating “mass 

produced mayhem.” Assault Weapons Profile 19 (1994). 

This description is elaborated in the Siebel testimony for the 

Brady Center: “the military features of semiautomatic assault 

weapons are designed to enhance their capacity to shoot 

multiple human targets very rapidly” and “[p]istol grips on 

assault rifles ... help stabilize the weapon during rapid fire and 

allow the shooter to spray-fire from the hip position.” The 

same source also suggests assault weapons are preferred by 

criminals and place law enforcement officers “at particular 

risk ... because of their high firepower,” as does the ATF, see 

Dep’t of Treasury, Study on the Sporting Suitability of 

Modified Semiautomatic Assault Rifles 34–35, 38 (1998). See 

also Christopher S. Koper et al., U. Penn. Jerry Lee Ctr. of 

Criminology, An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault 

Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 

1994–2003, at 51, 87 (2004) (assault weapons “account for a 

larger share of guns used in mass murders and murders of 

police, crimes for which weapons with greater firepower 

would seem particularly useful,” and “criminal use of [assault 

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34

weapons] ... declined after” the federal assault weapons ban 

enacted in 1994 “independently of trends in gun crime”); id.

at 11 (“AR-15 type rifles are civilian weapons patterned after 

the U.S. military’s M-16 rifle and were the assault rifles most 

commonly used in crime before the ban” in federal law from 

1994 to 2004).

Heller suggests “M-16 rifles and the like” may be banned 

because they are “dangerous and unusual,” see 554 U.S. at 

627. The Court had previously described the “AR-15” as “the 

civilian version of the military’s M-16 rifle.” Staples v. 

United States, 511 U.S. 600, 603 (1994). Although semiautomatic firearms, unlike automatic M-16s, fire “only one 

shot with each pull of the trigger,” id. at 602 n.1, semiautomatics still fire almost as rapidly as automatics. See

Testimony of Brian J. Siebel, Brady Center to Prevent Gun 

Violence, at 1 (Oct. 1, 2008) (“30-round magazine” of UZI 

“was emptied in slightly less than two seconds on full 

automatic, while the same magazine was emptied in just five 

seconds on semiautomatic”). Indeed, it is difficult to draw 

meaningful distinctions between the AR-15 and the M-16. 

See Staples, 511 U.S. at 603 (“Many M-16 parts are 

interchangeable with those in the AR-15 and can be used to 

convert the AR-15 into an automatic weapon”); Koper, supra, 

at 4 (AR-15 and other federally banned assault weapons “are 

civilian copies of military weapons and accept ammunition 

magazines made for those military weapons”). In short, the 

evidence demonstrates a ban on assault weapons is likely to 

promote the Government’s interest in crime control in the 

densely populated urban area that is the District of Columbia. 

See Comm. on Pub. Safety, Report on Bill 17-593, at 4 (Nov. 

25, 2008) (“The District shares the problem of gun violence 

with other dense, urban jurisdictions”).

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35

The record also supports the limitation on magazine 

capacity to ten rounds. The Committee relied upon Siebel’s 

testimony that “[t]he threat posed by military-style assault 

weapons is increased significantly if they can be equipped 

with high-capacity ammunition magazines” because, “[b]y 

permitting a shooter to fire more than ten rounds without 

reloading, they greatly increase the firepower of mass 

shooters.” See also Koper, supra, at 87 (“guns used in 

shootings are 17% to 26% more likely to have [magazines 

holding more than ten rounds] than guns used in gunfire cases 

resulting in no wounded victims”); id. at 97 (“studies ... 

suggest that attacks with semiautomatics — including [assault 

weapons] and other semiautomatics with [magazines holding 

more than ten rounds] — result in more shots fired, persons 

wounded, and wounds per victim than do other gun attacks”). 

The Siebel testimony moreover supports the District’s claim 

that high-capacity magazines are dangerous in self-defense 

situations because “the tendency is for defenders to keep 

firing until all bullets have been expended, which poses grave 

risks to others in the household, passersby, and bystanders.” 

Moreover, the Chief of Police testified the “2 or 3 second 

pause” during which a criminal reloads his firearm “can be of 

critical benefit to law enforcement.” Overall the evidence 

demonstrates that large-capacity magazines tend to pose a 

danger to innocent people and particularly to police officers, 

which supports the District’s claim that a ban on such 

magazines is likely to promote its important governmental 

interests.

We conclude the District has carried its burden of 

showing a substantial relationship between the prohibition of 

both semi-automatic rifles and magazines holding more than 

ten rounds and the objectives of protecting police officers and 

controlling crime. Accordingly, the bans do not violate the 

plaintiffs’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

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36

III. Conclusion

For the reasons stated above, we affirm the judgment of 

the district court with respect, first, to the requirement of mere 

registration as applied to handguns and expressed in D.C. 

Code §§ 7-2502.01(a) and 7-2502.03(b), and second, to the 

ban on “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines, as 

they are defined in §§ 7-2502.02(a)(6), 7-

2501.01(3A)(A)(i)(I), (IV), and 7-2506.01(b). With respect to

the registration requirements in §§ 7-2502.03(a)(10), 7-

2502.03(a)(11), 7-2502.03(a)(13)(A), 7-2502.03(d), 7-

2502.03(e), 7-2502.04, and 7-2502.07a, and all the 

registration requirements (including §§ 7-2502.01(a) and 7-

2502.03(b)) as applied to long guns, see Part II.B.3.c, the 

judgment is vacated and this matter is remanded to the district 

court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

So ordered.

Appendix: Regarding the Dissent

Our colleague has issued a lengthy dissenting opinion 

explaining why he would strike down both the District’s 

registration requirements and its ban on semi-automatic rifles. 

We respond to his main arguments below.

A. Interpreting Heller and McDonald

A substantial portion of the dissent is devoted to arguing 

Heller and McDonald preclude the application of heightened 

(intermediate, or for that matter, strict) scrutiny in all Second 

Amendment cases. The dissent reasons that Heller rejected 

balancing tests and that heightened scrutiny is a type of 

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37

balancing test. As we read Heller, the Court rejected only 

Justice Breyer’s proposed “interest-balancing” inquiry, which 

would have had the Court ask whether the challenged statute 

“burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is 

out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other

important governmental interests.” 554 U.S. at 689–90 

(Breyer J., dissenting). That is, Justice Breyer, rather than ask 

merely whether the Government is promoting an important 

interest by way of a narrowly tailored means, as we do here, 

would have had courts in Second Amendment cases decide 

whether the challenged statute “imposes burdens that, when 

viewed in light of the statute’s legitimate objectives, are 

disproportionate.” Id. at 693. Thus, although Justice Breyer 

would have had us assess whether the District’s handgun ban 

“further[s] the sort of life-preserving and public-safety 

interests that the Court has called ‘compelling,’” id. at 705 

(citation omitted), the key to his “interest-balancing” 

approach was “proportionality”; that is, he would have had us 

weigh this governmental interest against “the extent to which 

the District’s law burdens the interests that the Second 

Amendment seeks to protect,” id. at 706.

Our dissenting colleague asserts (at 25) heightened 

scrutiny is also “a form of interest balancing” and maintains 

that strict and intermediate scrutiny “always involve at least 

some assessment of whether the law in question is sufficiently 

important to justify infringement on an individual 

constitutional right.” Although, as he points out, the Supreme 

Court has in a few opinions applying heightened scrutiny —

out of scores if not hundreds of such opinions — used the 

word “balance,” heightened scrutiny is clearly not the 

“interest-balancing inquiry” proposed by Justice Breyer and 

rejected by the Court in Heller. The Court there said, Justice 

Breyer’s proposal did not correspond to any of “the 

traditionally expressed levels (strict scrutiny, intermediate 

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38

scrutiny, rational basis),” 554 U.S. at 634, but was rather “a 

judge-empowering ‘interest-balancing inquiry’” that would 

have a court weigh the asserted governmental interests against 

the burden the Government would place upon exercise of the 

Second Amendment right, a balancing that is not part of either 

strict or intermediate scrutiny.

The dissent further contends McDonald confirms the 

Supreme Court’s rejection of heightened scrutiny in Second 

Amendment cases because a plurality of the Court there said 

“Justice Breyer is incorrect that incorporation will require 

judges to assess the costs and benefits of firearms restrictions 

and thus to make difficult empirical judgments in an area in 

which they lack expertise.” 130 S. Ct. at 3050. That

observation was clearly and specifically directed to Justice 

Breyer’s interest-balancing inquiry, as the very next sentence 

shows: “As we have noted, while his opinion in Heller

recommended an interest-balancing test, the Court 

specifically rejected that suggestion.” Id. Moreover, strict 

and intermediate scrutiny do not, as the dissent asserts (at 19), 

“obviously require assessment of the ‘costs and benefits’ of 

government regulations.” Rather, they require an assessment 

of whether a particular law will serve an important or 

compelling governmental interest; that is not a comparative 

judgment.

If the Supreme Court truly intended to rule out any form 

of heightened scrutiny for all Second Amendment cases, then 

it surely would have said at least something to that effect. Cf. 

Heller, 554 U.S. at 628 n.27 (expressly rejecting rational basis 

review). The Court did not say anything of the sort; the 

plaintiffs in this case do not suggest it did; and the idea that 

Heller precludes heightened scrutiny has eluded every circuit 

to have addressed that question since Heller was issued. See 

First Circuit: United States v. Booker, 644 F.3d 12, 25 (2011) 

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39

(requiring “a substantial relationship between the restriction 

and an important governmental objective”); Third Circuit: 

Marzzarella, 614 F.3d at 97 (applying intermediate scrutiny);

Fourth Circuit: United States v. Masciandaro, 638 F.3d 458, 

471 (2011) (same); Chester, 628 F.3d at 683 (same); id. at 

690 (Davis, J., concurring) (same); Seventh Circuit: Ezell, 

2011 WL 2623511, at *17 (applying “more rigorous 

showing” than intermediate scrutiny, “if not quite ‘strict 

scrutiny’”); id. at *21–22 (Rovner J., concurring) (endorsing

intermediate scrutiny); Williams, 616 F.3d at 692–93

(applying intermediate scrutiny); United States v. Skoien, 614 

F.3d 638, 641–42 (2010) (en banc) (upholding law upon 

assumption intermediate scrutiny applies); Ninth Circuit: 

Nordyke, 644 F.3d at 786 n.9 (reserving “precisely what type 

of heightened scrutiny applies to laws that substantially 

burden Second Amendment rights”); id. at 795 (Gould J., 

concurring in part, “would subject to heightened scrutiny only 

arms regulations falling within the core purposes of the 

Second Amendment” and “would subject incidental burdens 

on the Second Amendment right ... to reasonableness 

review”); Tenth Circuit: Reese, 627 F.3d at 802 (applying 

intermediate scrutiny).

The dissent (at 30–31) takes us to task for suggesting a 

restriction on a core enumerated constitutional right can be 

subjected to intermediate scrutiny. This assertion, true or 

false, is simply misplaced; we apply intermediate scrutiny 

precisely because the District’s laws do not affect the core 

right protected by the Second Amendment. See supra at 22–

24, 31–32.

Unlike our dissenting colleague, we read Heller

straightforwardly: The Supreme Court there left open and 

untouched even by implication the issue presented in this 

case. The Court held the ban on handguns unconstitutional 

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40

without at the same time adopting any particular level of 

scrutiny for Second Amendment cases because it concluded 

that “[u]nder any of the standards of scrutiny that we have 

applied to enumerated constitutional rights, banning from the 

home the most preferred firearm in the nation to keep and use 

for protection of one’s home and family would fail 

constitutional muster.” Id. at 628–29 (internal quotation 

marks and citation omitted); McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3036 

(quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 628–30). Nothing in Heller

suggests a case involving a restriction significantly less severe 

than the total prohibition of handguns at issue there could or 

should be resolved without reference to one or another of the 

familiar constitutional “standards of scrutiny.” On the 

contrary, the Supreme Court was explicit in cautioning that 

because Heller was its “first in-depth examination of the 

Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the 

entire field.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 635; see also, e.g., Ezell, 

2011 WL 2623511, at *13 (with the exception of “broadly 

prohibitory laws restricting the core Second Amendment 

right,” courts are “left to choose an appropriate standard of 

review from among the heightened standards of scrutiny the 

Court applies to governmental actions alleged to infringe 

enumerated constitutional rights”); Chester, 628 F.3d at 682 

(“Heller left open the level of scrutiny applicable to review a 

law that burdens conduct protected under the Second 

Amendment, other than to indicate that rational-basis review 

would not apply in this context”); Volokh, supra, at 1456 

(“The Court [in Heller] did not discuss what analysis would 

be proper for less ‘severe’ restrictions, likely because it had 

no occasion to”). 

Having rejected the possibility of heightened scrutiny, the 

dissent (at 31) goes on to find in Heller this proposition: “Gun 

bans and gun regulations that are not longstanding or 

sufficiently rooted in text, history, and tradition are not 

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41

consistent with the Second Amendment individual right.” We 

do not see this purportedly “up-front” test “announced”

anywhere in the Court’s opinion. The Court in Heller said 

certain “longstanding” regulations are “presumptively 

lawful,” 554 U.S. at 626–27 & n.26, but it nowhere suggested, 

nor does it follow logically, that a regulation must be 

longstanding or “rooted in text, history, and tradition” in order 

to be constitutional. As we have said, the Court struck down 

the handgun ban because it so severely restricted the core 

Second Amendment right of self-defense in the home that it 

“would fail constitutional muster” under any standard of 

scrutiny. Likewise, the Court invalidated the District’s 

requirement that handguns “in the home be rendered and kept 

inoperable” because that requirement “makes it impossible for 

citizens to use them for the core lawful purpose of selfdefense.” Id. at 630. The Court in Heller did consider 

whether there were historical analogues to the handgun ban, 

but only to note, primarily in response to Justice Breyer’s 

dissent, that because earlier laws were far less restrictive, they 

did not support the constitutionality of a ban on handguns. 

See id. at 632 (“Nothing about [the] fire-safety laws” cited by 

Justice Breyer “undermines our analysis; they do not remotely 

burden the right of self-defense as much as an absolute ban on 

handguns”); id. (“other founding-era laws” cited by Justice 

Breyer “provide no support for the severe restriction in the 

present case”). In any event, we think it clear Heller did not 

announce the “up-front” test applicable to all Second 

Amendment cases that our dissenting colleague goes to great 

lengths to “divine” from that opinion.

In sum, Heller explicitly leaves many questions 

unresolved and says nothing to cast doubt upon the propriety 

of the lower courts applying some level of heightened 

scrutiny in a Second Amendment challenge to a law 

significantly less restrictive than the outright ban on all 

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42

handguns invalidated in that case. Although Heller renders 

longstanding regulations presumptively constitutional, it 

nowhere suggests a law must be longstanding or rooted in 

text, history, and tradition to be constitutional.

B. Registration Requirements

Our dissenting colleague contends (at 47) the historical 

registration laws we cite do not support the District’s basic 

registration requirement because to rely upon those laws as 

historical precedents “is to conduct the Heller analysis at an 

inappropriately high level of generality.” In fact, however, 

the historical regulations and the District’s basic registration 

requirement are not just generally alike, they are practically 

identical: They all require gun owners to give an agent of the 

Government basic information about themselves and their 

firearm. 

In any event, we do not decide, but rather remand to the 

district court, the question whether the District’s novel 

registration requirements and all its registration requirements 

as applied to long guns withstand intermediate scrutiny. See 

supra at 28. Accordingly, those registration requirements will 

be deemed constitutional only if the District shows they serve 

its undoubtedly important governmental interests in 

preventing crimes and protecting police officers.

C. Assault Weapons

In arguing Heller requires holding unconstitutional the 

District’s ban on certain semi-automatic rifles, the dissent

relies heavily upon the idea that Heller held possession of 

semi-automatic handguns is “constitutionally protected.” The 

Court’s holding in Heller was in fact narrower, condemning 

as unconstitutional a prohibition of all handguns, that is, a ban 

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43

on the “entire class of ‘arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen 

by American society for [the] lawful purpose” of self-defense. 

554 U.S. at 628. A narrower prohibition, such as a ban on 

certain semi-automatic pistols, may also “fail constitutional 

muster,” id., but that question has not yet been decided by the 

Supreme Court.

*

 Therefore, the dissent (at 32–33) 

mischaracterizes the question before us as whether “the 

Second Amendment protects semi-automatic handguns but 

not semi-automatic rifles.” The dissent at (38 n.16) insists it 

is “implausible” to read Heller as “protect[ing] handguns that 

are revolvers but not handguns that are semi-automatic.” We 

do not, however, hold possession of semi-automatic handguns 

is outside the protection of the Second Amendment. We 

simply do not read Heller as foreclosing every ban on every 

possible sub-class of handguns or, for that matter, a ban on a 

sub-class of rifles. See Marzzarella, 614 F.3d at 101 

(upholding prohibition on possession of handguns with serial 

numbers obliterated); cf. Joseph Blocher, Categoricalism and 

Balancing in First and Second Amendment Analysis, 84 

N.Y.U. L. Rev. 375, 422 (2009) (Heller “avoided—perhaps in 

part because it had little cause to consider—categorization at 

the level of classification: that is, the creation of subcategories 

that may warrant only intermediate protection”).**

 * Indeed, as we noted in Part I, the present plaintiffs, whilst in the 

district court, separately and specifically challenged the ban on 

certain semi-automatic pistols. ** Moreover, despite the dissent’s contrary assertion (at 36), a 

number of states and municipalities, representing over one fourth of 

the Nation’s population, ban semi-automatic rifles or assault 

weapons, and these bans are by no means “significantly narrower” 

than the District’s ban. See N.Y. Penal Law §§ 265.00(22), 

265.02(7), 265.10 (prohibiting possession, manufacture, disposal, 

and transport of assault weapons, including AR-15); Conn. Gen. 

Stat. §§ 53-202a, 53-202c (prohibiting possession of semiautomatic 

firearms, including AR-15); Cal. Penal Code §§ 12276–12282 

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44

The dissent, indulging us by assuming some level of 

heightened scrutiny applies, maintains (at 37) “D.C. cannot 

show a compelling interest in banning semi-automatic rifles.” 

Why not? “[B]ecause the necessary implication of the 

decision in Heller is that D.C. could not show a sufficiently 

compelling interest to justify its banning semi-automatic 

handguns.” That conclusion, however, is neither to be found 

in nor inferred from Heller. As we explain above, the Court 

in Heller held the District’s ban on all handguns would fail 

constitutional muster under any standard of scrutiny because 

the handgun is the “quintessential” self-defense weapon. See

554 U.S. at 629 (“There are many reasons that a citizen may 

prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier to store in a 

location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot 

easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is 

easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift 

 

(same); Haw. Rev. Stat. §§ 134-1, 134-4, 134-8 (banning assault 

pistols); Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 140, §§ 121–123 (banning assault 

weapons as defined in expired federal law); Md. Code, Criminal 

Law, §§ 4-301–4-306 (prohibiting assault pistols); N.J. Stat. Ann. 

§§ 2C:39-1(w), 2C:39-5 (prohibiting assault firearms, including 

AR-15); Legal Cmty. Against Violence, Regulating Guns in 

America: An Evaluation and Comparative Analysis of Federal, 

State, and Selected Local Guns Laws, 25–26 (Feb. 2008), 

http://www.lcav.org/publicationsbriefs/reports_analyses/RegGuns.entire.report.pdf (Boston, 

Cleveland, Columbus, and New York City prohibit assault 

weapons, including semi-automatic rifles); Aurora, Ill., Code of 

Ordinances § 29-49 (prohibiting assault weapons, including AR15); City Code of Buffalo N.Y. § 180-1 (prohibiting assault 

weapons, including assault rifles); Denver Colo. Mun. Code § 38-

130 (same); City of Rochester Code § 47-5 (same). In fact, the 

District’s prohibition is very similar to the nationwide ban on 

assault weapons that was in effect from 1994 to 2004. See 18 

U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(30), 922(v)(1) (prohibiting possession of semiautomatic rifles and pistols, including AR-15).

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45

and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one 

hand while the other hand dials the police”). The same cannot 

be said of semi-automatic rifles.

Finally, in criticizing our application of intermediate 

scrutiny to the ban on assault weapons, our dissenting 

colleague says (at 33, 40) “it is difficult to make the case that 

semi-automatic rifles are significantly more dangerous than 

semi-automatic handguns” “because handguns can be 

concealed.” It is not our place, however, to determine in the 

first instance whether banning semi-automatic rifles in 

particular would promote important law-enforcement 

objectives. Our role is narrower, viz., to determine whether 

the District has presented evidence sufficient to “establish the 

reasonable fit we require” between the law at issue and an 

important or substantial governmental interest. Fox, 492 U.S. 

at 480.

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KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judge, dissenting: The Second 

Amendment to the Constitution provides: “A well regulated

Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the 

right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be 

infringed.” In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme 

Court held that the Second Amendment confers “an individual 

right to keep and bear arms.” 554 U.S. 570, 595 (2008). In 

McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Court added that the right 

to keep and bear arms is a “fundamental” constitutional right 

implicit in our scheme of ordered liberty and “deeply rooted 

in this Nation’s history and tradition.” 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3036, 

3042 (2010).

In Heller, the Court ruled that the District of Columbia’s 

ban on the possession of handguns violated the Second 

Amendment. 554 U.S. at 635. In the wake of Heller, the 

District of Columbia enacted a new gun law. As relevant 

here, D.C. bans possession of most semi-automatic rifles and 

requires registration of all guns possessed in the District of 

Columbia. See D.C. Code §§ 7-2501.01(3A)(A)(i), 

7-2502.01-.10.

In this case, we are called upon to assess those provisions 

of D.C.’s law under Heller. In so doing, we are of course 

aware of the longstanding problem of gun violence in the 

District of Columbia. In part for that reason, Heller has 

engendered substantial controversy. See, e.g., J. Harvie 

Wilkinson III, Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule 

of Law, 95 VA. L. REV. 253 (2009); Richard A. Posner, In 

Defense of Looseness, THE NEW REPUBLIC, Aug. 27, 2008, at 

32. As a lower court, however, it is not our role to re-litigate 

Heller or to bend it in any particular direction. Our sole job is 

to faithfully apply Heller and the approach it set forth for 

analyzing gun bans and regulations.

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2

In my judgment, both D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic 

rifles and its gun registration requirement are unconstitutional 

under Heller.

In Heller, the Supreme Court held that handguns – the 

vast majority of which today are semi-automatic – are 

constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally 

been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens. 

There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional 

distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semiautomatic rifles. Semi-automatic rifles, like semi-automatic 

handguns, have not traditionally been banned and are in 

common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the 

home, hunting, and other lawful uses. Moreover, semiautomatic handguns are used in connection with violent 

crimes far more than semi-automatic rifles are. It follows

from Heller’s protection of semi-automatic handguns that 

semi-automatic rifles are also constitutionally protected and 

that D.C.’s ban on them is unconstitutional. (By contrast, 

fully automatic weapons, also known as machine guns, have 

traditionally been banned and may continue to be banned after 

Heller.)

1

D.C.’s registration requirement, which is significantly 

more stringent than any other federal or state gun law in the 

United States, is likewise unconstitutional. Heller and later 

McDonald said that regulations on the sale, possession, or use 

 1

 A semi-automatic gun “fires only one shot with each pull of 

the trigger” and “requires no manual manipulation by the operator 

to place another round in the chamber after each round is fired.” 

Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600, 602 n.1 (1994). A fully 

automatic gun – also known as a machine gun – “fires repeatedly 

with a single pull of the trigger. That is, once its trigger is 

depressed, the weapon will automatically continue to fire until its 

trigger is released or the ammunition is exhausted.” Id.

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3

of guns are permissible if they are within the class of 

traditional, “longstanding” gun regulations in the United 

States. Registration of all lawfully possessed guns – as 

distinct from licensing of gun owners or mandatory recordkeeping by gun sellers – has not traditionally been required in 

the United States and even today remains highly unusual. 

Under Heller’s history- and tradition-based test, D.C.’s 

registration requirement is therefore unconstitutional.2

It bears emphasis that Heller, while enormously

significant jurisprudentially, was not revolutionary in terms of 

its immediate real-world effects on American gun regulation. 

Indeed, Heller largely preserved the status quo of gun 

regulation in the United States. Heller established that 

traditional and common gun laws in the United States remain 

constitutionally permissible. The Supreme Court simply 

pushed back against an outlier local law – D.C.’s handgun ban

– that went far beyond the traditional line of gun regulation. 

As Heller emphasized: “Few laws in the history of our 

Nation have come close to the severe restriction of the 

District’s” law. 554 U.S. at 629.3

 2

 Plaintiffs also challenge D.C.’s ban on magazines of more 

than 10 rounds. I would remand that issue for further factual 

development in the District Court. See infra note 20. 3

 In that sense, Heller was similar in its overarching practical 

and real-world ramifications to recent Supreme Court decisions 

such as Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, 131 S. Ct. 2729 

(2011); Graham v. Florida, 130 S. Ct. 2011 (2010); Kennedy v. 

Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008); and Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620

(1996). Those decisions disapproved novel or uncommon state 

legislative efforts to regulate beyond traditional boundaries in areas 

that affected enumerated individual constitutional rights –

California’s law banning sale of violent video games, Florida’s law 

permitting life without parole for certain juvenile crimes, 

Louisiana’s law permitting the death penalty for certain rapes, and 

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4

After Heller, however, D.C. seemed not to heed the 

Supreme Court’s message. Instead, D.C. appeared to push the 

envelope again, with its new ban on semi-automatic rifles and 

its broad gun registration requirement. D.C.’s public safety 

motivation in enacting these laws is worthy of great respect. 

But the means D.C. has chosen are again constitutionally 

problematic. The D.C. gun provisions at issue here, like the 

ban at issue in Heller, are outliers that are not traditional or 

common in the United States. As with D.C.’s handgun ban, 

therefore, holding these D.C. laws unconstitutional would not 

lead to nationwide tumult. Rather, such a holding would 

maintain the balance historically and traditionally struck in 

the United States between public safety and the individual 

right to keep arms – a history and tradition that Heller

affirmed and adopted as determining the scope of the Second 

Amendment right.

I

A key threshold question in this case concerns the 

constitutional test we should employ to assess the challenged 

provisions of the D.C. gun law. The Heller Court held that 

the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to 

 

Colorado’s law prohibiting gay people from receiving protection 

from discrimination. Because those laws were outliers, the 

decisions invalidating them did not cause major repercussions 

throughout the Nation. Heller was a decision in that same vein, in 

terms of its immediate practical effects in the United States. By 

contrast, of course, some Supreme Court decisions interpreting the 

Constitution’s individual rights provisions not only are significant 

jurisprudentially but also have substantial practical impacts on

common federal or state practices. See, e.g., Melendez-Diaz v. 

Massachusetts, 129 S. Ct. 2527 (2009); Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 

332 (2009); United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005). Heller

was not a decision of that kind.

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5

possess guns. But the Court emphasized that the Second 

Amendment does not protect “a right to keep and carry any 

weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for 

whatever purpose.” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 

570, 626 (2008). “Like most rights, the right secured by the 

Second Amendment is not unlimited.” Id.

In light of that limiting language in Heller, constitutional 

analysis of D.C.’s new law raises two main questions. Under 

Heller, what kinds of firearms may the government ban? And

what kinds of regulations may the government impose on the 

sale, possession, or use of firearms?

Put in simple terms, the issue with respect to what test to 

apply to gun bans and regulations is this: Are gun bans and 

regulations to be analyzed based on the Second Amendment’s 

text, history, and tradition (as well as by appropriate 

analogues thereto when dealing with modern weapons and 

new circumstances, see infra Part I.B)? Or may judges recalibrate the scope of the Second Amendment right based on 

judicial assessment of whether the law advances a sufficiently 

compelling or important government interest to override the 

individual right? And if the latter, is the proper test strict 

scrutiny or intermediate scrutiny?

As I read Heller, the Supreme Court was not silent about 

the answers to those questions. Rather, the Court set forth 

fairly precise guidance to govern those issues going forward.

A

In my view, Heller and McDonald leave little doubt that 

courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, 

history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or 

intermediate scrutiny. To be sure, the Court never said 

something as succinct as “Courts should not apply strict or 

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intermediate scrutiny but should instead look to text, history, 

and tradition to define the scope of the right and assess gun 

bans and regulations.” But that is the clear message I take 

away from the Court’s holdings and reasoning in the two 

cases.

As to bans on categories of guns, the Heller Court stated

that the government may ban classes of guns that have been 

banned in our “historical tradition” – namely, guns that are

“dangerous and unusual” and thus are not “the sorts of lawful 

weapons that” citizens typically “possess[] at home.” 554 

U.S. at 627. The Court said that “dangerous and unusual 

weapons” are equivalent to those weapons not “in common 

use,” as the latter phrase was used in United States v. Miller, 

307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939). Heller, 554 U.S. at 627. Thus, the

“Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not 

typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful 

purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns” or automatic “M16 rifles and the like.” Id. at 625, 627. That interpretation, 

the Court explained, “accords with the historical 

understanding of the scope of the right.” Id. at 625. 

“Constitutional rights,” the Court said, “are enshrined with the 

scope they were understood to have when the people adopted 

them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future 

judges think that scope too broad.” Id. at 634-35. The scope 

of the right is thus determined by “historical justifications.” 

Id. at 635. And tradition (that is, post-ratification history) 

also matters because “examination of a variety of legal and 

other sources to determine the public understanding of a legal 

text in the period after its enactment or ratification” is a 

“critical tool of constitutional interpretation.” Id. at 605

(emphasis omitted).

Because the D.C. law at issue in Heller banned handguns

(including semi-automatic handguns), which have not 

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7

traditionally been banned and are in common use by lawabiding citizens, the Court found that the D.C. ban on 

handgun possession violated the Second Amendment. 

Stressing the D.C. law’s inconsistency with our “historical 

tradition,” id. at 627, the Court stated that “[f]ew laws in the 

history of our Nation have come close to the severe restriction 

of the District’s” law, id. at 629.

As to regulations on the sale, possession, or use of guns,

Heller similarly said the government may continue to impose 

regulations that are traditional, “longstanding” regulations in 

the United States. Id. at 626-27. In McDonald, the Court 

reiterated that “longstanding regulatory measures” are 

permissible. McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 

3047 (2010) (controlling opinion of Alito, J.). Importantly, 

the Heller Court listed several examples of such longstanding 

(and therefore constitutionally permissible) regulations, such 

as laws against concealed carry and laws prohibiting 

possession of guns by felons. 554 U.S. at 626. The Court 

stated that analysis of whether other gun regulations are 

permissible must be based on their “historical justifications.” 

Id. at 635.4

 4 The Court in Heller stated as follows:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second 

Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 

19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely 

explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any 

weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for 

whatever purpose. For example, the majority of the 19thcentury courts to consider the question held that prohibitions 

on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second 

Amendment or state analogues. Although we do not 

undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full 

scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion 

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8

In disapproving D.C.’s ban on handguns, in approving a 

ban on machine guns, and in approving longstanding 

regulations such as concealed-carry and felon-in-possession 

laws, Heller established that the scope of the Second 

Amendment right – and thus the constitutionality of gun bans 

and regulations – is determined by reference to text, history, 

and tradition. As to the ban on handguns, for example, the 

Supreme Court in Heller never asked whether the law was 

 

should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on 

the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or 

laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places 

such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing 

conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

We also recognize another important limitation on the 

right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have 

explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in 

common use at the time.” We think that limitation is fairly 

supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying 

of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

554 U.S. at 626-27 (citations and footnote omitted). The Court in 

McDonald reiterated:

As evidence that the Fourteenth Amendment has not 

historically been understood to restrict the authority of the 

States to regulate firearms, municipal respondents and 

supporting amici cite a variety of state and local firearms laws 

that courts have upheld. But what is most striking about their 

research is the paucity of precedent sustaining bans 

comparable to those at issue here and in Heller. . . . We made 

it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such 

longstanding regulatory measures as “prohibitions on the 

possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” “laws 

forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as 

schools and government buildings, or laws imposing 

conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

130 S. Ct. at 3047 (controlling opinion of Alito, J.) (quoting Heller, 

554 U.S. at 626-27).

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narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest

(strict scrutiny) or substantially related to an important 

government interest (intermediate scrutiny). If the Supreme 

Court had meant to adopt one of those tests, it could have said

so in Heller and measured D.C.’s handgun ban against the 

relevant standard. But the Court did not do so; it instead 

determined that handguns had not traditionally been banned 

and were in common use – and thus that D.C.’s handgun ban 

was unconstitutional.

Moreover, in order for the Court to prospectively approve

the constitutionality of several kinds of gun laws – such as 

machine gun bans, concealed-carry laws, and felon-inpossession laws – the Court obviously had to employ some 

test. Yet the Court made no mention of strict or intermediate 

scrutiny when approving such laws. Rather, the test the Court 

relied on – as it indicated by using terms such as “historical 

tradition” and “longstanding” and “historical justifications” –

was one of text, history, and tradition. Id. at 626-27, 635; see

Eugene Volokh, Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear 

Arms for Self-Defense: An Analytical Framework and a 

Research Agenda, 56 UCLA L. REV. 1443, 1463 (2009) 

(“Absent [from Heller] is any inquiry into whether the law is 

necessary to serve a compelling government interest in 

preventing death and crime, though handgun ban proponents 

did indeed argue that such bans are necessary to serve those 

interests and that no less restrictive alternative would do the 

job.”); Joseph Blocher, Categoricalism and Balancing in First 

and Second Amendment Analysis, 84 N.Y.U. L. REV. 375, 380 

(2009) (“Rather than adopting one of the First Amendment’s 

many Frankfurter-inspired balancing approaches, the majority 

endorsed a categorical test under which some types of ‘Arms’ 

and arms-usage are protected absolutely from bans and some 

types of ‘Arms’ and people are excluded entirely from 

constitutional coverage.”); id. at 405 (Heller “neither requires 

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nor permits any balancing beyond that accomplished by the 

Framers themselves.”).5

B

Before addressing the majority opinion’s contrary 

analysis of Heller and McDonald, it is important to 

underscore two points regarding Heller’s focus on text, 

history, and tradition.

First, just because gun regulations are assessed by 

reference to history and tradition does not mean that 

governments lack flexibility or power to enact gun 

regulations. Indeed, governments appear to have more

flexibility and power to impose gun regulations under a test 

based on text, history, and tradition than they would under 

strict scrutiny. After all, history and tradition show that a 

variety of gun regulations have co-existed with the Second 

Amendment right and are consistent with that right, as the 

Court said in Heller.

6

 5 The Court’s failure to employ strict or intermediate scrutiny 

appears to have been quite intentional and well-considered. Cf. Tr. 

of Oral Arg. at 44, Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (No. 07-290) (Chief Justice 

Roberts: “Well, these various phrases under the different standards 

that are proposed, ‘compelling interest,’ ‘significant interest,’ 

‘narrowly tailored,’ none of them appear in the Constitution . . . . I 

mean, these standards that apply in the First Amendment just kind 

of developed over the years as sort of baggage that the First 

Amendment picked up.”).

 By contrast, if courts applied strict 

6 It is not uncommon for courts to look to post-ratification 

history and tradition to inform the interpretation of a constitutional 

provision. For example, when interpreting the scope of the 

President’s Article II power, the Court has relied on such history 

and tradition. See Dames & Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654, 679 n.8 

(1981). So, too, the Court looked to traditional practice when 

analyzing an Establishment Clause issue related to legislative 

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scrutiny, then presumably very few gun regulations would be 

upheld. Indeed, Justice Breyer made this point in his dissent 

in Heller when he noted that the majority opinion had listed 

certain permissible gun regulations “whose constitutionality 

under a strict-scrutiny standard would be far from clear.” 554 

U.S. at 688 (Breyer, J., dissenting).7

So the major difference between applying the Heller

history- and tradition-based approach and applying one of the 

forms of scrutiny is not necessarily the number of gun 

regulations that will pass muster. Instead, it is that the Heller

test will be more determinate and “much less subjective”

because “it depends upon a body of evidence susceptible of 

reasoned analysis rather than a variety of vague ethicopolitical First Principles whose combined conclusion can be 

found to point in any direction the judges favor.” McDonald, 

130 S. Ct. at 3058 (Scalia, J., concurring).

 

prayer. See Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783, 786-92 (1983). 

That said, post-ratification adoption or acceptance of laws that are 

inconsistent with the original meaning of the constitutional text 

obviously cannot overcome or alter that text. The Court in 

Marbury found unconstitutional a law passed by the First Congress. 

See Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). The practice of 

separate but equal was inconsistent with and repugnant to the text 

and original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. See Brown v. 

Bd. of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Strauder v. West Virginia, 

100 U.S. 303 (1880). The existence of post-ratification examples 

of congressional exclusion of elected members did not persuade the 

Court in Powell v. McCormack: “That an unconstitutional action 

has been taken before surely does not render that same action any 

less unconstitutional at a later date.” 395 U.S. 486, 546-47 (1969).

7 The fact that fewer gun laws might pass muster under strict 

scrutiny than under a history- and tradition-based approach is no 

doubt why the plaintiffs in Heller and here have advocated strict 

scrutiny.

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To be sure, analyzing the history and tradition of gun 

laws in the United States does not always yield easy answers. 

Justice Scalia, the author of the Heller majority opinion, thus 

acknowledged in his concurrence in McDonald: “No 

fundamental right – not even the First Amendment – is 

absolute. The traditional restrictions go to show the scope of 

the right, not its lack of fundamental character. . . . Historical 

analysis can be difficult; it sometimes requires resolving 

threshold questions, and making nuanced judgments about 

which evidence to consult and how to interpret it. I will 

stipulate to that.” Id. at 3056-57. That said, the range of 

potential answers will be far more focused under an approach 

based on text, history, and tradition than under an interestbalancing test such as intermediate scrutiny. See id. at 3057 

n.9.

Second, when legislatures seek to address new weapons 

that have not traditionally existed or to impose new gun 

regulations because of conditions that have not traditionally 

existed, there obviously will not be a history or tradition of 

banning such weapons or imposing such regulations. That 

does not mean the Second Amendment does not apply to 

those weapons or in those circumstances. Nor does it mean 

that the government is powerless to address those new 

weapons or modern circumstances. Rather, in such cases, the 

proper interpretive approach is to reason by analogy from 

history and tradition. See Parker v. District of Columbia, 478 

F.3d 370, 398 (D.C. Cir. 2007) (“[J]ust as the First 

Amendment free speech clause covers modern 

communication devices unknown to the founding generation, 

e.g., radio and television, and the Fourth Amendment protects 

telephonic conversation from a ‘search,’ the Second 

Amendment protects the possession of the modern-day 

equivalents of the colonial pistol.”) (emphasis added), aff’d 

sub nom. Heller, 554 U.S. 570; Tr. of Oral Arg. at 77, Heller, 

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554 U.S. 570 (No. 07-290) (Chief Justice Roberts: “[Y]ou 

would define ‘reasonable’ in light of the restrictions that 

existed at the time the amendment was adopted. . . . [Y]ou 

can’t take it into the marketplace was one restriction. So that 

would be – we are talking about lineal descendents of the 

arms but presumably there are lineal descendents of the 

restrictions as well.”); cf. Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 

31-35 (2001) (applying traditional Fourth Amendment 

standards to novel thermal imaging technology); California v. 

Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207, 213 (1986) (allowing government to 

view property from airplanes based on common-law principle 

that police could look at property when passing by homes on 

public thoroughfares).

The Constitution is an enduring document, and its 

principles were designed to, and do, apply to modern 

conditions and developments. The constitutional principles 

do not change (absent amendment), but the relevant principles 

must be faithfully applied not only to circumstances as they 

existed in 1787, 1791, and 1868, for example, but also to 

modern situations that were unknown to the Constitution’s 

Framers. To be sure, applying constitutional principles to 

novel modern conditions can be difficult and leave close 

questions at the margins. But that is hardly unique to the 

Second Amendment. It is an essential component of judicial 

decisionmaking under our enduring Constitution.

C

The majority opinion here applies intermediate scrutiny 

and contends that intermediate scrutiny is consistent with 

Heller and McDonald. The majority opinion employs history 

and tradition only as a threshold screen to determine whether 

the law in question implicates the individual right; if so, the 

majority opinion then subjects the individual right to 

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balancing under the intermediate scrutiny test. As explained 

above, I disagree with that approach. I read Heller and 

McDonald as setting forth a test based wholly on text, history, 

and tradition. Deeper examination of the two Supreme Court 

opinions – and, in particular, how the Court’s opinions

responded to the dissents in the two cases – buttresses my 

conclusion.

Turning first to Heller: The back and forth between the 

Heller majority opinion and Justice Breyer’s dissent

underscores that the proper Second Amendment test focuses 

on text, history, and tradition. In his dissent, Justice Breyer 

suggested that the Court should follow the lead of certain First 

Amendment cases, among others, that had applied a form of 

intermediate-scrutiny interest balancing:

The fact that important interests lie on both sides of the 

constitutional equation suggests that review of guncontrol regulation is not a context in which a court should 

effectively presume either constitutionality (as in 

rational-basis review) or unconstitutionality (as in strict 

scrutiny). Rather, “where a law significantly implicates 

competing constitutionally protected interests in complex 

ways,” the Court generally asks whether the statute 

burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that 

is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon 

other important governmental interests. See Nixon v. 

Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U.S. 377, 402 

(2000) (Breyer, J., concurring). . . .

In particular this Court, in First Amendment cases 

applying intermediate scrutiny, has said that our “sole 

obligation” in reviewing a legislature’s “predictive 

judgments” is “to assure that, in formulating its 

judgments,” the legislature “has drawn reasonable 

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inferences based on substantial evidence.” Turner, 520 

U.S., at 195 (internal quotation marks omitted). And 

judges, looking at the evidence before us, should agree 

that the District legislature’s predictive judgments satisfy 

that legal standard. . . .

There is no cause here to depart from the standard set 

forth in Turner, for the District’s decision represents the 

kind of empirically based judgment that legislatures, not 

courts, are best suited to make. See Nixon, 528 U.S., at 

402 (Breyer, J., concurring). . . .

The upshot is that the District’s objectives are 

compelling; its predictive judgments as to its law’s 

tendency to achieve those objectives are adequately 

supported; the law does impose a burden upon any selfdefense interest that the Amendment seeks to secure; and 

there is no clear less restrictive alternative.

Heller, 554 U.S. at 689-90, 704-05, 714 (Breyer, J., 

dissenting).

Justice Breyer expressly rejected strict scrutiny and 

rational basis review. Instead, he explicitly referred to 

intermediate scrutiny and relied on cases such as Turner 

Broadcasting that had applied intermediate scrutiny. See 

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 520 U.S. 180, 189-

225 (1997). And he discussed the strength of the 

government’s interest and the fit between the law and those 

interests, as the Court does when applying heightened 

scrutiny. It is thus evident that Justice Breyer’s Heller dissent

advocated a form of intermediate scrutiny.

8

 8 The Heller majority stated that Justice Breyer was not 

proposing any of the traditional forms of scrutiny “explicitly at 

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The Court responded to Justice Breyer by rejecting his 

“judge-empowering ‘interest-balancing inquiry’ that ‘asks 

whether the statute burdens a protected interest in a way or to 

an extent that is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary 

effects upon other important governmental interests.’” 

Heller, 554 U.S. at 634 (quoting id. at 689-90 (Breyer, J., 

dissenting)). The Court stated rather emphatically: “We 

know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core 

protection has been subjected to a freestanding ‘interestbalancing’ approach. The very enumeration of the right takes 

out of the hands of government – even the Third Branch of 

Government – the power to decide on a case-by-case basis 

whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A 

constitutional guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments 

of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all.” Id.

 

least.” 554 U.S. at 634 (emphasis added). Justice Breyer ruled out 

strict scrutiny and rational basis review and relied heavily on 

Turner Broadcasting, which had applied a form of intermediate 

scrutiny. But he was not explicit about the label for his test, as the 

Heller majority opinion noted. In that regard, it bears mention that 

strict scrutiny and intermediate scrutiny can take on different forms 

in different contexts that are sometimes colloquially referred to as, 

for example, strict-scrutiny-light or intermediate-scrutiny-plus or 

the like. How strong the government interest must be, how directly 

the law must advance that interest, how reasonable the alternatives 

must be – those questions are not always framed with precision in 

two clearly delineated categories, as opposed to points on a sliding 

scale of heightened scrutiny approaches. See, e.g., Nixon v. Shrink 

Missouri Government PAC, 528 U.S. 377, 387-88 (2000) (“a 

contribution limit involving significant interference with 

associational rights could survive if the Government demonstrated 

that contribution regulation was closely drawn to match a 

sufficiently important interest”) (citations and internal quotation 

marks omitted); United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 531, 533 

(1996) (referring to “skeptical scrutiny” and “heightened review” of 

gender-based law).

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In rejecting a judicial interest-balancing approach, the 

Court explained that the Second Amendment “is the very 

product of an interest balancing by the people” that judges 

should not “now conduct for them anew.” Id. at 635. The 

Court added that judges may not alter the scope of the 

Amendment because “[c]onstitutional rights are enshrined 

with the scope they were understood to have when the people 

adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even 

future judges think that scope too broad.” Id. at 634-35. The 

Court emphasized that the scope of the right was determined 

by “historical justifications.” Id. at 635. And the Court stated 

that tradition (that is, post-ratification history) matters because 

“examination of a variety of legal and other sources to 

determine the public understanding of a legal text in the 

period after its enactment or ratification” is a “critical tool of 

constitutional interpretation.” Id. at 605 (emphasis omitted).

To be sure, the Court noted in passing that D.C.’s 

handgun ban would fail under any level of heightened 

scrutiny or review the Court applied. Id. at 628-29. But that 

was more of a gilding-the-lily observation about the extreme 

nature of D.C.’s law – and appears to have been a pointed 

comment that the dissenters should have found D.C.’s law 

unconstitutional even under their own suggested balancing 

approach – than a statement that courts may or should apply 

strict or intermediate scrutiny in Second Amendment cases. 

We know as much because the Court expressly dismissed 

Justice Breyer’s Turner Broadcasting intermediate scrutiny

approach and went on to demonstrate how courts should 

consider Second Amendment bans and regulations – by 

analysis of text, history, and tradition. Id. at 626-27, 634-35.

Is it possible, however, that the Heller Court was ruling 

out intermediate scrutiny but leaving open the possibility that 

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strict scrutiny might apply? That seems highly unlikely, for 

reasons Justice Breyer himself pointed out in dissent:

Respondent proposes that the Court adopt a “strict 

scrutiny” test, which would require reviewing with care 

each gun law to determine whether it is “narrowly 

tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest.” 

Abrams v. Johnson, 521 U.S. 74, 82 (1997); see Brief for 

Respondent 54-62. But the majority implicitly, and 

appropriately, rejects that suggestion by broadly 

approving a set of laws – prohibitions on concealed 

weapons, forfeiture by criminals of the Second 

Amendment right, prohibitions on firearms in certain 

locales, and governmental regulation of commercial 

firearm sales – whose constitutionality under a strictscrutiny standard would be far from clear.

Id. at 688 (Breyer, J., dissenting).

Justice Breyer thus perceived that the Court’s historyand tradition-based approach would likely permit 

governments to enact more gun laws and regulations than a 

strict scrutiny approach would allow. History and tradition 

establish that several gun regulations have co-existed with the 

Second Amendment right and are consistent with that right, as 

the Court determined in Heller. If courts applied strict 

scrutiny, however, very few gun regulations would 

presumably be constitutional.

Even more to the point, as Justice Breyer also noted, the 

Court in Heller affirmatively approved a slew of gun laws –

machine gun bans, concealed-carry laws, felon-in-possession 

laws, and the like – without analyzing them under strict 

scrutiny. The Court approved them based on a history- and 

tradition-based test, not strict scrutiny. Indeed, these laws

might not have passed muster under a strict scrutiny analysis.

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The Court’s later decision in McDonald underscores that 

text, history, and tradition guide analysis of gun laws and 

regulations. There, the Court again precluded the use of 

balancing tests; furthermore, it expressly rejected judicial 

assessment of “the costs and benefits of firearms restrictions” 

and stated that courts applying the Second Amendment thus 

would not have to make “difficult empirical judgments” about 

the efficacy of particular gun regulations. 130 S. Ct. at 3050

(controlling opinion of Alito, J.).

That language from McDonald is critically important 

because strict and intermediate scrutiny obviously require 

assessment of the “costs and benefits” of government 

regulations and entail “difficult empirical judgments” about 

their efficacy – precisely what McDonald barred. 

McDonald’s rejection of such inquiries, which was even more 

direct than Heller’s, is flatly incompatible with a strict or 

intermediate scrutiny approach to gun regulations.

That conclusion is fortified by a careful examination of 

the back and forth in McDonald between Justice Alito’s 

controlling opinion and Justice Breyer’s dissent.

In his McDonald dissent, Justice Breyer explained at

some length that he was concerned about the practical 

ramifications of Heller and McDonald because judges would 

have great difficulty assessing gun regulations under 

heightened scrutiny (whether it might be called strict or 

intermediate or something else on that heightened scrutiny 

spectrum). He stated that determining the constitutionality of 

a gun regulation would “almost always require the weighing 

of the constitutional right to bear arms against the primary 

concern of every government – a concern for the safety and 

indeed the lives of its citizens.” 130 S. Ct. at 3126 (Breyer, J., 

dissenting) (internal quotation marks omitted). “Given the 

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competing interests, courts will have to try to answer 

empirical questions of a particularly difficult kind.” Id. He 

listed a variety of possible gun laws that would raise such 

difficult empirical questions, including laws regulating semiautomatic rifles and laws imposing registration requirements. 

Id. Justice Breyer asserted that assessing the constitutionality 

of those laws under heightened scrutiny would require 

difficult judicial evaluations of the effectiveness of particular 

gun laws. Justice Breyer asked: “How can the Court assess 

the strength of the government’s regulatory interests without 

addressing issues of empirical fact? How can the Court 

determine if a regulation is appropriately tailored without 

considering its impact? And how can the Court determine if 

there are less restrictive alternatives without considering what 

will happen if those alternatives are implemented?” Id. at 

3127.

The questions identified by Justice Breyer are of course 

the kinds of questions that courts ask when applying 

heightened scrutiny. So how did the Court respond to Justice 

Breyer? The Court simply rejected the premise of Justice 

Breyer’s criticism. Those kinds of difficult assessments 

would not need to be made, the Court said, because courts

would not be applying that kind of test or scrutiny: “Justice 

Breyer is incorrect that incorporation will require judges to 

assess the costs and benefits of firearms restrictions and thus 

to make difficult empirical judgments in an area in which they 

lack expertise. As we have noted, while his opinion in Heller 

recommended an interest-balancing test, the Court 

specifically rejected that suggestion. ‘The very enumeration 

of the right takes out of the hands of government – even the 

Third Branch of Government – the power to decide on a caseby-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting 

upon.’” Id. at 3050 (controlling opinion of Alito, J.) (citation

omitted) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 684). The Court also

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reiterated that “longstanding” gun regulations were 

constitutionally permissible. Id. at 3047.

The McDonald Court’s response to Justice Breyer is 

quite telling for our purposes: The Court dismissed the 

suggestion that courts in Second Amendment cases would 

need to assess the strength of the government’s regulatory 

interests, or determine whether the regulation was 

appropriately tailored, or consider the alternatives. In other 

words, the Court declined to conduct the kinds of inquiries 

that would need to be conducted under a form of strict or 

intermediate scrutiny.

But Justice Breyer then asked: From where did the Court 

derive the exceptions the Court listed in Heller and McDonald 

allowing laws that ban concealed carry, possession by a felon, 

and the like? Justice Breyer suggested that the Court “simply 

invented rules that sound sensible.” Id. at 3127 (Breyer, J., 

dissenting). But the Court responded that, no, it was not 

inventing rules but rather was holding that the scope of the 

right was determined by text, history, and tradition – and that 

“longstanding regulatory measures” were therefore 

permissible. Id. at 3047 (controlling opinion of Alito, J.). As 

the Court had explained in Heller, the scope of the right was 

determined by text, history, and tradition, and such 

longstanding laws were within the historical understanding of 

the scope of the right. See also McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3050, 

3056 (Scalia, J., concurring) (Court’s approach “makes the 

traditions of our people paramount”; “traditional restrictions” 

on the right are permissible).

D

Although Heller and McDonald rejected judicial interest 

balancing, the majority opinion here applies intermediate 

scrutiny. The majority opinion does so because it says that

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heightened scrutiny tests are not actually balancing tests and 

thus were not precluded by the Supreme Court’s rejection of 

balancing tests. I disagree with the majority opinion’s attempt 

to distinguish Heller and McDonald in this way.

To begin with, as explained above, the Court in my view 

went further in Heller and McDonald than just rejecting the 

concept of balancing tests. The Court emphasized the role of 

history and tradition; it rejected not only balancing but also 

examination of costs and benefits; it disclaimed the need for 

difficult empirical judgments; it specifically rejected Justice 

Breyer’s approach, which was a form of intermediate scrutiny

as applied in Turner Broadcasting; and it prospectively 

blessed certain laws for reasons that could be (and were)

explained only by history and tradition, not by analysis under 

a heightened scrutiny test.

It is ironic, moreover, that Justice Breyer’s dissent 

explicitly advocated an approach based on Turner 

Broadcasting; that the Heller majority flatly rejected that

Turner Broadcasting-based approach; and that the majority 

opinion here nonetheless turns around and relies expressly 

and repeatedly on Turner Broadcasting. See Heller, 554 U.S. 

at 690, 704-05 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (citing Turner 

Broadcasting, 520 U.S. 180); Heller, 554 U.S. at 634-35; 

Maj. Op. at 22-23, 26-28 (citing Turner Broadcasting, 520 

U.S. 180; Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 

622 (1994)).

In addition, the premise of the majority opinion’s more 

general point – that Heller’s rejection of balancing tests does 

not mean it rejected strict and intermediate scrutiny – is 

incorrect. Strict and intermediate scrutiny are balancing tests

and thus are necessarily encompassed by Heller’s more 

general rejection of balancing.

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The heightened scrutiny approach largely took hold as a 

First Amendment principle – articulated most prominently by 

Justices Frankfurter and Harlan – to uphold laws that 

infringed free speech rights but were deemed to be justified 

by an overriding public purpose, often in cases involving 

speech by Communists. See Konigsberg v. State Bar of 

California, 366 U.S. 36, 49-52 (1961); Barenblatt v. United 

States, 360 U.S. 109, 126-27, 134 (1959); Sweezy v. New 

Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 265-67 (1957) (Frankfurter, J., 

concurring in judgment). From the beginning, it was 

recognized that those tests were balancing tests. In 

Barenblatt, for example, one of the early cases applying a 

form of what we now call strict scrutiny, the Court stated that 

First Amendment rights may be overcome based on “a 

balancing by the courts of the competing private and public 

interests at stake in the particular circumstances shown,” and 

that the “subordinating interest of the State must be 

compelling in order to overcome the individual constitutional 

rights at stake.” 360 U.S. at 126-27 (internal quotation marks 

omitted). In Konigsberg, the Court similarly explained that 

laws limiting speech could be justified by “valid 

governmental interests, a prerequisite to constitutionality 

which has necessarily involved a weighing of the 

governmental interest involved.” 366 U.S. at 50-51. Writing 

for the Court, Justice Harlan noted that the test required an 

“appropriate weighing of the respective interests involved.” 

Id. at 51. In dissent, Justice Black objected to a “doctrine that 

permits constitutionally protected rights to be ‘balanced’

away whenever a majority of this Court thinks that a State 

might have interest sufficient to justify abridgment of those 

freedoms.” Id. at 61 (Black, J., dissenting).

As in their original formulations, the successor strict and 

intermediate scrutiny tests applied today remain quintessential 

balancing inquiries that focus ultimately on whether a 

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particular government interest is sufficiently compelling or 

important to justify an infringement on the individual right in 

question. Cf. Denver Area Educ. Telecomms. Consortium, 

Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727, 740-41 (1996) (the Court’s 

application of varying levels of scrutiny is a process of 

“restat[ing] and refin[ing] . . . basic First Amendment 

principles, adopting them more particularly to the balance of 

competing interests and the special circumstances of each 

field of application”); Employment Div., Dep’t of Human Res.

of Or. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 889 n.5 (1990) (applying strict 

scrutiny to general laws that burden religious practice would 

require judges to “regularly balance against the importance of 

general laws the significance of religious practice”); Mario L. 

Barnes & Erwin Chemerinsky, The Once and Future Equal 

Protection Doctrine?, 43 CONN. L. REV. 1059, 1080 (2011) 

(“The levels of scrutiny are essentially balancing tests – each 

test determines how the weights on the scale are to be 

arranged. Strict scrutiny puts the weights strongly against the 

government and rational basis places the weights in its 

favor.”); Alan Brownstein, The Religion Clauses as Mutually

Reinforcing Mandates, 32 CARDOZO L. REV. 1701, 1721-22 

(2011) (though strict scrutiny is not as “ad hoc, subjective and 

indeterminate” as a “multi-factor balancing test” or 

“intermediate level scrutiny,” even under strict scrutiny “there 

will be some cases, where the state’s interest is authentic and 

substantial, which will require balancing”); Stephen A. Siegel, 

The Origin of the Compelling State Interest Test and Strict 

Scrutiny, 48 AM. J. LEGAL HIST. 355, 375 (2006) 

(“compelling state interest doctrine” is a “balancing test”)

(internal quotation marks omitted); Darrell A.H. Miller, Retail 

Rebellion and the Second Amendment, 86 IND. L.J. 939, 967 

(2011) (“both Heller and McDonald indicate strongly that 

standards of scrutiny are just shorthand for unguided interest 

balancing”).

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To be sure, application of the strict and intermediate 

scrutiny tests yields categorical results and rules over time. 

And strict scrutiny in particular places a heavy thumb on the 

scale in favor of the individual right in question, meaning the 

balance is often struck against the government. But the tests 

are undoubtedly balancing tests that require a contemporary 

judicial assessment of the strength of the asserted government

interests in imposing a particular regulation. If that interest is 

deemed sufficiently strong, and the law is deemed to be 

appropriately tailored to serving that interest given the 

potential alternatives, then the law generally overcomes the 

individual right. That is a form of interest balancing. It is 

true that strict and intermediate scrutiny come in a variety of 

flavors and are not always applied in the exact same way in 

all settings (as illustrated by Justice Breyer’s extensive 

explanation in his Heller dissent). But they always involve at 

least some assessment of whether the law in question is 

sufficiently important to justify infringement on an individual 

constitutional right. That’s balancing. And Heller and 

McDonald rejected the use of balancing tests – including, 

therefore, strict or intermediate scrutiny – in fleshing out the 

scope of the Second Amendment right.

Of course, as noted above, Heller and McDonald didn’t 

just reject interest balancing. The Court went much further by

expressly rejecting Justice Breyer’s intermediate scrutiny

approach, disclaiming cost-benefit analysis, and denying the 

need for empirical inquiry. By doing so, the Court made 

clear, in my view, that strict and intermediate scrutiny are 

inappropriate.

In short, I do not see how Heller and McDonald can be 

squared with application of strict or intermediate scrutiny to 

D.C.’s gun laws. The majority opinion here refers to the 

levels of scrutiny as “familiar.” Maj. Op. at 40. As one 

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commentator has stated, however, “the search for the familiar 

may be leading courts and commentators astray: The central 

disagreement in Heller was a debate not about strict scrutiny 

and rational basis review but rather about categoricalism and 

balancing.” Blocher, Categoricalism and Balancing in First 

and Second Amendment Analysis, 84 N.Y.U. L. REV. at 379.

9

E

 

That disagreement in Heller was resolved in favor of 

categoricalism – with the categories defined by text, history, 

and tradition – and against balancing tests such as strict or 

intermediate scrutiny or reasonableness.

It might be objected that the Supreme Court could not 

have intended a test cabined by text, history, and tradition

(and analogues thereto when addressing modern weapons or 

conditions) given the prevalence of strict and intermediate 

scrutiny tests in the Court’s jurisprudence regarding some 

other constitutional rights. I disagree with that suggestion and 

think it is based on too narrow a view of the Court’s overall 

constitutional jurisprudence.

Taking a step back, we know the Supreme Court has 

developed an array of rules, tests, and standards specific to 

each right. Particularly for a lower court, it is difficult 

therefore to apply an overarching interpretive approach to 

questions of constitutional law that are necessarily guided by 

decades of precedent interpreting different provisions of the 

Constitution under different methodologies. Some individual 

constitutional rights are analyzed under heightened (strict or 

intermediate) scrutiny, some under categorical tests divined 

 9 I recognize that some other courts of appeals have adopted 

approaches similar to the majority opinion’s approach here. Based 

on my reading of Heller and McDonald, I respectfully have come to 

a different conclusion.

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from text, history, and tradition, some by reasonableness tests, 

some in other ways.

Strict and intermediate scrutiny today are primarily used 

in substantive due process and equal protection cases, and for 

certain aspects of First Amendment free speech doctrine. 

Strict and intermediate scrutiny tests are not employed in the 

Court’s interpretation and application of many other 

individual rights provisions of the Constitution.

For example, the Court has not typically invoked strict or 

intermediate scrutiny to analyze the Jury Trial Clause, the 

Establishment Clause, the Self-Incrimination Clause, the 

Confrontation Clause, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments 

Clause, or the Habeas Corpus Clause, to name a few. See, 

e.g., Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008); Boumediene 

v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008); United States v. Booker, 543 

U.S. 220 (2005); Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992); 

Lefkowitz v. Turley, 414 U.S. 70 (1973). In a recent landmark 

case concerning the Confrontation Clause, the Court stated in 

language quite similar to Heller’s that by “replacing 

categorical constitutional guarantees with open-ended 

balancing tests, we do violence to their design. Vague 

standards are manipulable.” Crawford v. Washington, 541 

U.S. 36, 67-68 (2004).

Even in the First Amendment case law, which the 

majority opinion here looks to for guidance, the Court has not 

used strict or intermediate scrutiny when considering bans on 

categories of speech. In United States v. Stevens, the Court 

echoed Heller: “The First Amendment’s guarantee of free 

speech does not extend only to categories of speech that 

survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and 

benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by 

the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the 

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Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses 

any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that 

some speech is not worth it. The Constitution is not a 

document ‘prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits 

may be passed at pleasure.’” 130 S. Ct. 1577, 1585 (2010)

(quoting Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 178 (1803)); see 

also Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the N.Y. State 

Crime Victims Bd., 502 U.S. 105, 125 (1991) (Kennedy, J., 

concurring) (When the “regulated content has the full 

protection of the First Amendment,” that “is itself a full and 

sufficient reason for holding the statute unconstitutional. In 

my view it is both unnecessary and incorrect to ask whether 

the State can show that the statute is necessary to serve a 

compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn to achieve 

that end.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).

In short, it would hardly have been unusual or 

unthinkable for the Supreme Court to set forth a Second 

Amendment test based on text, history, and tradition – rather 

than a heightened scrutiny approach. (Indeed, in Heller, the 

Supreme Court affirmed this Court’s decision, which 

similarly declined to adopt a strict or intermediate scrutiny 

test.) Therefore, I would take the Supreme Court’s words in 

Heller and McDonald at face value and not superimpose on 

those opinions a strict or intermediate scrutiny test that the 

Court declined to apply.

F

To sum up so far: Because the Supreme Court in Heller

did not adopt a strict or intermediate scrutiny test and rejected

judicial interest balancing, I must disagree with the majority

opinion’s decision in this case to adopt the intermediate 

scrutiny balancing test. In my view, it is a severe stretch to 

read Heller, as the majority opinion does, as consistent with 

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an intermediate scrutiny balancing test. The Supreme Court 

struck down D.C.’s handgun ban because handguns have not 

traditionally been banned and are in common use by lawabiding citizens, not because the ban failed to serve an 

important government interest and thus failed the intermediate 

scrutiny test. And the Court endorsed certain gun laws 

because they were rooted in history and tradition, not because 

they passed the intermediate scrutiny test.

One final aside about the appropriate test to apply: Even 

if it were appropriate to apply one of the levels of scrutiny 

after Heller, surely it would be strict scrutiny rather than the 

intermediate scrutiny test adopted by the majority opinion 

here. Heller ruled that the right to possess guns is a core 

enumerated constitutional right and rejected Justice Breyer’s 

suggested Turner Broadcasting intermediate scrutiny 

approach. And McDonald later held that “the right to keep 

and bear arms” is “among those fundamental rights necessary 

to our system of ordered liberty.” 130 S. Ct. at 3042.

For those fundamental substantive constitutional rights 

that the Court has subjected to a balancing test and analyzed 

under one of the levels of scrutiny – for example, the First 

Amendment freedom of speech and the rights protected by 

substantive due process – the Court has generally employed 

strict scrutiny to assess direct infringements on the right. See, 

e.g., Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876, 898 (2010) (First 

Amendment strict scrutiny in context of infringement on 

“political speech”); Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 

640, 648 (2000) (First Amendment strict scrutiny in context 

of infringement on freedom of association); United States v. 

Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U.S. 803, 813 (2000) 

(First Amendment strict scrutiny in context of content-based 

speech regulation); Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 

721 (1997) (substantive due process doctrine “forbids the 

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government to infringe fundamental liberty interests . . . 

unless the infringement is narrowly tailored to serve a 

compelling state interest”) (internal quotation marks and 

alteration omitted); see generally Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Strict 

Judicial Scrutiny, 54 UCLA L. REV. 1267, 1271 (2007) (“the 

Supreme Court adopted the strict scrutiny formula as its 

generic test for the protection of fundamental rights”).

Strict scrutiny requires the government to show that a law 

is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. See 

Citizens United, 130 S. Ct. at 898 (strict scrutiny “requires the 

Government to prove that the restriction furthers a compelling 

interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest”) 

(internal quotation marks omitted). This test strongly favors

the individual right in question. See Brown v. Entertainment 

Merchants Ass’n, 131 S. Ct. 2729, 2738 (2011) (strict scrutiny 

“is a demanding standard”); Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U.S. 267, 

294 (2004) (plurality opinion) (strict scrutiny imposes “a 

strong presumption of invalidity” with a “thumb on the 

scales” in favor of the individual right); Dunn v. Blumstein, 

405 U.S. 330, 343 (1972) (under strict scrutiny, “a heavy 

burden of justification is on the State”).

It is especially inappropriate for the majority opinion here 

to apply intermediate scrutiny rather than strict scrutiny to 

D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic rifles. No court of appeals 

decision since Heller has applied intermediate scrutiny to a 

ban on a class of arms that have not traditionally been banned 

and are in common use. A ban on a class of arms is not an 

“incidental” regulation. It is equivalent to a ban on a category 

of speech. Such restrictions on core enumerated 

constitutional protections are not subjected to mere 

intermediate scrutiny review. The majority opinion here is in 

uncharted territory in suggesting that intermediate scrutiny 

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can apply to an outright ban on possession of a class of 

weapons that have not traditionally been banned.

G

In sum, our task as a lower court here is narrow and 

constrained by precedent. We need not squint to divine some 

hidden meaning from Heller about what tests to apply. Heller

was up-front about the role of text, history, and tradition in 

Second Amendment analysis – and about the absence of a role 

for judicial interest balancing or assessment of costs and 

benefits of gun regulations. Gun bans and gun regulations 

that are longstanding – or, put another way, sufficiently 

rooted in text, history, and tradition – are consistent with the 

Second Amendment individual right. Gun bans and gun 

regulations that are not longstanding or sufficiently rooted in 

text, history, and tradition are not consistent with the Second

Amendment individual right. Our role as a lower court is 

simply to apply the test announced by Heller to the 

challenged provisions of D.C.’s new gun laws.

II

Whether we apply the Heller history- and tradition-based 

approach or strict scrutiny or even intermediate scrutiny, 

D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic rifles fails to pass constitutional 

muster. D.C.’s registration requirement is likewise 

unconstitutional.

A

The first issue concerns D.C.’s ban on most semiautomatic rifles.10

 10 D.C.’s law bans semi-automatic rifles by listing specific 

guns that, as relevant here, share the characteristics of being a long 

 A semi-automatic gun “fires only one shot 

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with each pull of the trigger” and “requires no manual 

manipulation by the operator to place another round in the 

chamber after each round is fired.” Staples v. United States, 

511 U.S. 600, 602 n.1 (1994). That is in contrast to an 

automatic gun – also known as a machine gun – which “fires 

repeatedly with a single pull of the trigger. That is, once its 

trigger is depressed, the weapon will automatically continue 

to fire until its trigger is released or the ammunition is 

exhausted.” Id.11

The vast majority of handguns today are semiautomatic.12 In Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that D.C.’s 

law banning handguns, including semi-automatic handguns,

was unconstitutional. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 

U.S. 570, 628-29 (2008). This case concerns semi-automatic 

rifles.

13

 

gun and firing in a semi-automatic manner, and typically have 

features such as protruding pistol grips. D.C. Code 

§ 7-2501.01(3A)(A)(i)(I). The statute also includes a catchall 

provision covering semi-automatic rifles that have certain 

additional features such as protruding pistol grips. Id. 

§ 7-2501.01(3A)(A)(i)(IV).

As with handguns, a significant percentage of rifles

are semi-automatic. D.C. asks this Court to find that the

11 Under federal law, the “term ‘machinegun’ means any 

weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily 

restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual 

reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b).

12 See CHRISTOPHER S. KOPER, REPORT TO THE NAT’L INST.

OF JUSTICE, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE 81 (2004) (80% of handguns 

produced in 1993 were semi-automatic); DEP’T OF JUSTICE, GUNS 

USED IN CRIME 3 (1995) (“Most new handguns are pistols rather 

than revolvers.”).

13 Rifles are within a broader category referred to as “long 

guns.” Long guns, such as rifles and shotguns, are intended to be 

fired from the shoulder instead of with a single hand and are 

generally defined as being at least 16 to 18 inches long.

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Second Amendment protects semi-automatic handguns but 

not semi-automatic rifles.

There is no basis in Heller for drawing a constitutional 

distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semiautomatic rifles.

As an initial matter, considering just the public safety

rationale invoked by D.C., semi-automatic handguns are more 

dangerous as a class than semi-automatic rifles because 

handguns can be concealed. As was noted by the dissent in 

Heller, handguns “are the overwhelmingly favorite weapon of 

armed criminals.” 554 U.S. at 682 (Breyer, J., dissenting); 

see also FBI, CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES, 2009 tbl.20 

(2010). So it would seem a bit backwards – at least from a 

public safety perspective – to interpret the Second 

Amendment to protect semi-automatic handguns but not 

semi-automatic rifles. Indeed, at oral argument, the excellent 

Solicitor General for D.C. acknowledged that “an argument 

could be made that the government interest in banning 

handguns is just as compelling, if not more compelling” than 

the government interest in banning semi-automatic rifles. Tr. 

of Oral Arg. at 35. He added that “the government’s interest 

may be more compelling with regard to handgun[s].” Id. at 

36. Counsel’s frank acknowledgment highlights the serious 

hurdle that Heller erects in the way of D.C.’s attempt to ban 

semi-automatic rifles. Put simply, it would strain logic and 

common sense to conclude that the Second Amendment 

protects semi-automatic handguns but does not protect semiautomatic rifles.14

 14 Some would respond that the Second Amendment should 

not protect semi-automatic handguns either. But that option is not 

open to us after Heller. The question therefore is whether a 

sensible and principled constitutional line can be drawn between 

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More to the point for purposes of the Heller analysis, the 

Second Amendment as construed in Heller protects weapons 

that have not traditionally been banned and are in common 

use by law-abiding citizens. Semi-automatic rifles have not 

traditionally been banned and are in common use today, and 

are thus protected under Heller.

The first commercially available semi-automatic rifles, 

the Winchester Models 1903 and 1905 and the Remington 

Model 8, entered the market between 1903 and 1906. See

JOHN HENWOOD, THE 8 AND THE 81: A HISTORY OF 

REMINGTON’S PIONEER AUTOLOADING RIFLES 5 (1993); JOHN 

HENWOOD, THE FORGOTTEN WINCHESTERS: A HISTORY OF 

THE MODELS 1905, 1907, AND 1910 SELF-LOADING RIFLES 2-6 

(1995). (The first semi-automatic shotgun, designed by John 

Browning and manufactured by Remington, hit the market in 

1905 and was a runaway commercial success. See HENWOOD,

8 AND THE 81, at 4.) Other arms manufacturers, including 

Standard Arms and Browning Arms, quickly brought their 

own semi-automatic rifles to market. See id. at 64-69. Fiveshot magazines were standard, but as early as 1907,

Winchester was offering the general public ten-shot 

magazines for use with its .351 caliber semi-automatic rifles. 

See HENWOOD, THE FORGOTTEN WINCHESTERS 22-23. Many 

of the early semi-automatic rifles were available with pistol 

grips. See id. at 117-24. These semi-automatic rifles were 

designed and marketed primarily for use as hunting rifles, 

with a small ancillary market among law enforcement 

officers. See HENWOOD, 8 AND THE 81, at 115-21.

 

semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles. I think not. 

Such a line might be drawn out of a bare desire to restrict Heller as 

much as possible or to limit it to its facts, but that is not a sensible 

or principled constitutional line for a lower court to draw or a fair 

reading of the Heller opinion, in my view.

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By contrast, full automatics were developed for the 

battlefield and were never in widespread civilian use in the 

United States. Rifle-caliber machine guns (excluding the 

Gatling gun, which required hand cranking) first saw 

widespread use in the European colonial powers’ African 

conquests of the 1890s. See JOHN ELLIS, THE SOCIAL 

HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN 79-107 (1986). Automatic, 

pistol-caliber machine guns were fielded by European 

militaries toward the end of World War I. The Thompson 

machine gun (commonly known as the “Tommy gun”) 

entered commercial sale in the United States in the mid-1920s 

but saw very limited civilian use outside of organized crime 

and law enforcement. See LEE KENNETT & JAMES LAVERNE 

ANDERSON, THE GUN IN AMERICA 203-04 (1975). Within less 

than a decade, the Tommy gun and other automatic weapons 

had been subjected to comprehensive federal regulation. 

National Firearms Act, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236 (1934); see also

18 U.S.C. § 922(o).

Semi-automatic rifles remain in common use today, as 

even the majority opinion here acknowledges. See Maj. Op. 

at 30 (“We think it clear enough in the record that semiautomatic rifles . . . are indeed in ‘common use,’ as the 

plaintiffs contend.”). According to one source, about 40 

percent of rifles sold in 2010 were semi-automatic. See

NICHOLAS J. JOHNSON ET AL., FIREARMS LAW AND THE 

SECOND AMENDMENT: REGULATION, RIGHTS, AND POLICY ch. 

1 (forthcoming 2012). The AR-15 is the most popular semiautomatic rifle; since 1986, about two million semi-automatic 

AR-15 rifles have been manufactured. J.A. 84 (Declaration of 

Firearms Researcher Mark Overstreet). In 2007, the AR-15 

alone accounted for 5.5 percent of firearms and 14.4 percent 

of rifles produced in the United States for the domestic 

market. Id. A brief perusal of the website of a popular 

American gun seller underscores the point that semiUSCA Case #10-7036 Document #1333156 Filed: 10/04/2011 Page 80 of 97
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automatic rifles are quite common in the United States. See, 

e.g., CABELA’S, http://www.cabelas.com. Semi-automatic 

rifles are commonly used for self-defense in the home, 

hunting, target shooting, and competitions. J.A. 137 

(Declaration of Firearms Expert Harold E. Johnson). And 

many hunting guns are semi-automatic. Id.

Although a few states and municipalities ban some 

categories of semi-automatic rifles, most of the country does 

not, and even the bans that exist are significantly narrower 

than D.C.’s. What the Supreme Court said in Heller as to 

D.C.’s handgun ban thus applies just as well to D.C.’s new 

semi-automatic rifle ban: “Few laws in the history of our 

Nation have come close to the severe restriction of the 

District’s” law. 554 U.S. at 629.

What is more, in its 1994 decision in Staples, the

Supreme Court already stated that semi-automatic weapons 

“traditionally have been widely accepted as lawful 

possessions.” 511 U.S. at 612. Indeed, the precise weapon at 

issue in Staples was the AR-15. The AR-15 is the 

quintessential semi-automatic rifle that D.C. seeks to ban 

here. Yet as the Supreme Court noted in Staples, the AR-15 

is in common use by law-abiding citizens and has 

traditionally been lawful to possess. By contrast, as the Court 

stated in Staples and again in Heller, short-barreled shotguns 

and automatic “M-16 rifles and the like” are not in common 

use and have been permissibly banned by Congress. Heller, 

554 U.S. at 625, 627; see also Staples, 511 U.S. at 611-12 

(“certain categories of guns – no doubt including the 

machineguns, sawed-off shotguns, and artillery pieces that 

Congress has subjected to regulation – . . . have the same 

quasi-suspect character we attributed to owning hand 

grenades,” but “guns falling outside those categories 

traditionally have been widely accepted as lawful 

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possessions”); 18 U.S.C. § 922(o)(1) (“it shall be unlawful for 

any person to transfer or possess a machinegun”).

15

The Supreme Court’s statement in Staples that semiautomatic rifles are traditionally and widely accepted as 

lawful possessions further demonstrates that such guns are 

protected under the Heller history- and tradition-based test. 

The government may still ban automatic firearms (that is, 

machine guns), which traditionally have been banned. But 

the government may not generally ban semi-automatic guns, 

whether semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, or handguns.

Even if it were appropriate to apply some kind of 

balancing test or level of scrutiny to D.C.’s ban on semiautomatic rifles, the proper test would be strict scrutiny, as 

explained above. See supra Part I.F. That is particularly true

where, as here, a court is analyzing a ban on a class of arms 

within the scope of Second Amendment protection. If we are 

to apply strict scrutiny, we must do so in a manner consistent 

with Heller’s holding that D.C.’s handgun ban was 

unconstitutional. But D.C. cannot show a compelling interest 

in banning semi-automatic rifles because the necessary 

implication of the decision in Heller is that D.C. could not 

show a sufficiently compelling interest to justify its banning

semi-automatic handguns.

For its part, the majority opinion analyzes D.C.’s ban on 

semi-automatic rifles under an intermediate scrutiny

balancing test. Even if the majority opinion were right that 

intermediate scrutiny is the proper test, the majority opinion’s 

 15 In our decision in Parker, we similarly stated that handguns, 

shotguns, and rifles have traditionally been possessed by lawabiding citizens and are within the protection of the Second 

Amendment. Parker v. District of Columbia, 478 F.3d 370, 398 

(D.C. Cir. 2007), aff’d sub nom. Heller, 554 U.S. 570.

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application of intermediate scrutiny here is unconvincing: 

The fundamental flaw in the majority opinion is that it cannot 

persuasively explain why semi-automatic handguns are

constitutionally protected (as Heller held) but semi-automatic 

rifles are not.

In attempting to distinguish away Heller’s protection of 

semi-automatic handguns, the majority opinion suggests that 

semi-automatic rifles are almost as dangerous as automatic 

rifles (that is, machine guns) because semi-automatic rifles 

fire “almost as rapidly.” Maj. Op. at 34. Putting aside that 

the majority opinion’s data indicate that semi-automatics

actually fire two-and-a-half times slower than automatics, id., 

the problem with the comparison is that semi-automatic rifles

fire at the same general rate as semi-automatic handguns. 

And semi-automatic handguns are constitutionally protected 

under the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller. So the 

majority opinion cannot legitimately distinguish Heller on 

that basis. See Eugene Volokh, Implementing the Right to 

Keep and Bear Arms for Self-Defense: An Analytical 

Framework and a Research Agenda, 56 UCLA L. REV. 1443, 

1484 (2009) (“The laws generally define assault weapons to 

be a set of semiautomatic weapons (fully automatic weapons 

have long been heavily regulated, and lawfully owned fully 

automatics are very rare and very expensive) that are little 

different from semiautomatic pistols and rifles that are 

commonly owned by tens of millions of law-abiding citizens. 

‘Assault weapons’ are no more ‘high power’ than many other 

pistols and rifles that are not covered by the bans.”) (footnote 

omitted).16

 16 In passing, the majority opinion here tosses out the 

possibility that Heller might protect handguns that are revolvers but 

not handguns that are semi-automatic pistols. See Maj. Op. at 43. I 

find that an utterly implausible reading of Heller given the Court’s 

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39

The majority opinion next contends that semi-automatic 

handguns are good enough to meet people’s needs for selfdefense and that they shouldn’t need semi-automatic rifles. 

But that’s a bit like saying books can be banned because 

people can always read newspapers. That is not a persuasive

or legitimate way to analyze a law that directly infringes an 

enumerated constitutional right. Indeed, Heller itself 

specifically rejected this mode of reasoning: “It is no answer 

to say, as petitioners do, that it is permissible to ban the 

possession of handguns so long as the possession of other 

firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed.” 554 U.S. at 629; see 

also Parker v. District of Columbia, 478 F.3d 370, 400 (D.C. 

Cir. 2007) (“The District contends that since it only bans one 

type of firearm, ‘residents still have access to hundreds more,’ 

and thus its prohibition does not implicate the Second 

Amendment because it does not threaten total disarmament. 

We think that argument frivolous. It could be similarly 

contended that all firearms may be banned so long as sabers 

were permitted.”), aff’d sub nom. Heller, 554 U.S. 570. 

Furthermore, the majority opinion’s assertion does not 

sufficiently account for the fact that rifles, but typically not 

handguns, are used for hunting. Cf. Heller, 554 U.S. at 599

(most founding-era Americans “undoubtedly” thought right to 

own firearms “even more important for self-defense and 

hunting” than for militia service).

In support of its law, D.C. suggests that semi-automatic 

rifles are “offensive” and not just “defensive.” But that is 

plainly true of semi-automatic handguns as well (after all, 

handguns are far and away the guns most often used in violent 

crimes), and yet the Supreme Court held semi-automatic 

handguns to be constitutionally protected. Moreover, it’s hard

 

many blanket references to handguns and given that most handguns 

are semi-automatic.

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to see why, if a gun is effective for “offense,” it might not 

also be effective for “defense.” If a gun is employed by

criminals on the offense who are willing to violate laws and 

invade homes, for example, their potential victims will 

presumably want to be armed with similarly effective 

weapons for their defense. Cf. Heller, 554 U.S. at 711 

(Breyer, J., dissenting) (“the very attributes that make 

handguns particularly useful for self-defense are also what

make them particularly dangerous”). There is no reason to 

think that semi-automatic rifles are not effective for selfdefense in the home, which Heller explained is a core purpose 

of the Second Amendment right. The offense/defense

distinction thus doesn’t advance the analysis here, at least in 

part because it is the person, not the gun, who determines 

whether use of the gun is offensive or defensive. Perhaps 

D.C. – by referring to the offense/defense distinction – is 

simply intending to say that semi-automatic rifles are 

especially dangerous. But it is difficult to make the case that 

semi-automatic rifles are significantly more dangerous than 

semi-automatic handguns, and the Supreme Court has already

held semi-automatic handguns to be constitutionally 

protected.

D.C. repeatedly refers to the guns at issue in this case as 

“assault weapons.” But if we are constrained to use D.C.’s 

rhetoric, we would have to say that handguns are the 

quintessential “assault weapons” in today’s society; they are 

used far more often than any other kind of gun in violent 

crimes. See BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, PUB. NO.

194820, WEAPON USE AND VIOLENT CRIME 3 (2003) (87% of 

violent crimes committed with firearms between 1993 and 

2001 were committed with handguns). So using the rhetorical 

term “assault weapon” to refer to semi-automatic rifles does 

not meaningfully distinguish semi-automatic rifles from semiautomatic handguns. Nor does the rhetorical term “assault 

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weapon” help make the case that semi-automatic rifles may 

be banned even though semi-automatic handguns are 

constitutionally protected.

Under intermediate scrutiny, yet another problem with

D.C.’s law is its tailoring. The law is not sufficiently tailored 

even with respect to the category of semi-automatic rifles. It 

bans certain semi-automatic rifles but not others – with no 

particular explanation or rationale for why some made the list 

and some did not. The list appears to be haphazard. It does 

not reflect the kind of tailoring that is necessary to justify 

infringement of a fundamental right, even under the more 

relaxed intermediate scrutiny test.

In short, the majority opinion cannot persuasively explain 

why semi-automatic handguns are constitutionally protected 

but semi-automatic rifles are not. In Heller, D.C. argued that 

it could ban handguns because individuals could still own 

rifles. That argument failed. Here, D.C. contends that it can 

ban rifles because individuals can still own handguns. D.C.’s 

at-least-you-can-still-possess-other-kinds-of-guns argument is 

no more persuasive this time around. Under the Heller

history- and tradition-based test, or the strict scrutiny test, or 

even the majority opinion’s own intermediate scrutiny test, 

the D.C. ban on semi-automatic rifles is unconstitutional.

B

The second main issue on appeal concerns D.C.’s gun 

registration regime. D.C. requires registration of all guns 

lawfully possessed in D.C. The Supreme Court in Heller

expressly allowed “longstanding prohibitions on the 

possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws 

forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as 

schools and government buildings, or laws imposing 

conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of 

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arms.” 554 U.S. at 626-27 (emphasis added). The Court 

added that regulations and exceptions should be judged based 

on their “historical justifications.” Id. at 635. In McDonald, 

the Court summarized the point this way: “We made it clear 

in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such 

longstanding regulatory measures as ‘prohibitions on the 

possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,’ ‘laws 

forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as 

schools and government buildings, or laws imposing 

conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of 

arms.’” McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3047

(2010) (controlling opinion of Alito, J.) (quoting Heller, 554 

U.S. at 626-27).

17

The fundamental problem with D.C.’s gun registration 

law is that registration of lawfully possessed guns is not 

“longstanding.” Registration of all guns lawfully possessed 

by citizens in the relevant jurisdiction has not been 

traditionally required in the United States and, indeed,

remains highly unusual today.

In considering D.C.’s registration requirement, it’s 

initially important to distinguish registration laws from 

licensing laws. Licensing requirements mandate that gun 

owners meet certain standards or pass certain tests before 

 17 With respect to guns that the government has the 

constitutional authority to ban – namely, those classes of weapons 

that have traditionally been banned and are not in common use by 

law-abiding citizens – the government may of course impose 

registration as a lesser step. See United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 

174, 175 n.1 (1939) (describing federal statute requiring registration 

of short-barreled rifles and shotguns, machine guns, and silencers 

transported in interstate commerce). But D.C.’s registration 

requirement applies to all guns, not just those it has the authority to 

ban. 

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owning guns or using them in particular ways. Those laws 

can advance gun safety by ensuring that owners understand 

how to handle guns safely, particularly before guns are carried 

in public. For example, many jurisdictions that permit the 

carrying of concealed weapons have traditionally imposed 

licensing requirements on persons who wish to carry such

weapons. Registration requirements, by contrast, require 

registration of individual guns and do not meaningfully serve 

the purpose of ensuring that owners know how to operate 

guns safely in the way certain licensing requirements can. 

For that reason, registration requirements are often seen as 

half-a-loaf measures aimed at deterring gun ownership. It is 

true that registration requirements also provide a hook to 

convict (and potentially flip) criminals who are suspected of 

having committed other illegal acts, but as the majority 

opinion recognizes, that is a “circular” and constitutionally 

unacceptable rationale for requiring registration with respect 

to a core enumerated constitutional right. Maj. Op. at 25 n.*.

Likewise, it’s also important at the outset to distinguish 

registration requirements imposed on gun owners from 

record-keeping requirements imposed on gun sellers. Some 

record-keeping requirements on gun sellers are traditional and 

common. Thus, the government may constitutionally impose 

certain record-keeping requirements on the sellers of guns. 

See Heller, 554 U.S. at 627 (listing “conditions and 

qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” as being 

within category of traditional gun regulations).

The issue here, however, is registration of all guns owned 

by people in the District of Columbia. As D.C. 

acknowledges, there is not, and never has been, a 

“comprehensive federal system of firearm registration.” 

COUNCIL COMM. ON PUB. SAFETY & THE JUDICIARY, COMM.

REP. ON B. 17-843, at 3 (D.C. 2008). Similarly, the vast 

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majority of states have not traditionally required registration

of lawfully possessed guns. The majority opinion cites 

several state laws that have existed since the beginning of the 

20th Century. Maj. Op. at 16-17. But those state laws 

generally required record-keeping by gun sellers, not 

registration of all lawfully possessed guns by gun owners. 

There certainly is no tradition in the United States of gun 

registration imposed on all guns. And laws regulating gun 

sellers provide no support for D.C.’s registration requirement, 

which compels every gun owner to register every gun he or 

she lawfully possesses.

Even if modern laws alone could satisfy Heller’s historyand tradition-based test, there presumably would have to be a 

strong showing that such laws are common in the states. Cf. 

Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407, 423-26 (2008) (only six 

states permitting death penalty for child rapists shows national 

consensus against it). Such a showing cannot be made with 

respect to registration requirements. Today, most states

require no registration for any firearms; only seven states 

require registration for some firearms; and only Hawaii 

requires registration for all firearms. And even Hawaii does 

not impose all of the onerous requirements associated with 

registration that D.C. does.18

 18 The D.C. law at issue here requires far more than basic 

registration of guns. It mandates, among other things, that a gun 

owner submit every pistol for a “ballistics identification 

procedure,” D.C. Code § 7-502.03(d); appear in person to register a 

gun, § 7-2502.04; register only one pistol every 30 days, 

§ 7-2502.03(e); and renew each registration certificate every three

years, § 7-2502.07a(a). It is undisputed in this case that D.C.’s 

myriad registration-related requirements are unique – and uniquely 

burdensome – among laws in the United States. These additional 

registration-related requirements find even less support in history 

and tradition than the basic registration requirement.

 Put simply, D.C.’s registration 

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law is the strictest in the Nation, by D.C.’s own admission. 

See Firearms Control: Hearing of the H.C. Comm. on Home 

Aff. (U.K. 2010) (statement of Peter Nickles, D.C. Att’y 

Gen.) (acknowledging common view that D.C. has “the 

strictest gun laws in the United States”); see also Haw. Rev. 

Stat. § 134-3(a)-(b); Cal. Penal Code §§ 11106, 12276, 

12276.1, 12276.5, 12280, 12285(a) (registration of handguns 

and certain rifles that are otherwise banned); Conn. Gen. Stat. 

§ 53-202d(a) (registration of grandfathered rifles that are 

otherwise banned); Md. Code Ann., Crim. Law § 4-303(b)

(registration of grandfathered pistols that are otherwise 

banned); N.J. Stat. Ann. §§ 2C:39-5(f), 2C:58-12 (registration 

of grandfathered weapons that are otherwise banned); La. 

Rev. Stat. Ann. §§ 40:1781, 40:1783 (registration of limited 

types of firearms); Mich. Comp. Laws § 28.422 (de facto 

registration of pistols).

Because the vast majority of states have not traditionally 

required and even now do not require registration of lawfully 

possessed guns, D.C.’s registration law – which is the strictest

in the Nation and mandates registration of all guns – does not 

satisfy the history- and tradition-based test set forth in Heller

and later McDonald.

D.C. contends that registration is a longstanding 

requirement in American law because early militia laws

required militiamen to submit arms for inspection. See Robert 

H. Churchill, Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the 

Right to Keep Arms in Early America, 25 LAW & HIST. REV.

139, 161 (2007). But D.C.’s attempt to analogize its 

registration law to early militia laws is seriously flawed for 

two reasons. First, those early militia laws applied only to 

militiamen, not to all citizens. In general, men over age 45

and women did not have to comply with such laws. See 

Heller, 554 U.S. at 580 (“the militia in colonial America 

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consisted of a subset of the people – those who were male, 

able bodied, and within a certain age range”) (internal 

quotation marks omitted). Second, militia members were 

required to submit for inspection only one or a few firearms, 

not all of their firearms. That’s because the purpose of those 

early militia requirements was not registration of firearms, but 

rather simply to ensure that the militia was well-equipped. 

See, e.g., An Act for Amending the Several Laws for 

Regulating and Disciplining the Militia, and Guarding 

Against Invasions and Insurrections (1784), in 11 THE 

STATUTES AT LARGE; BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THE LAWS 

OF VIRGINIA 476, 476-79 (William Waller Hening ed., 

Richmond, George Cochran 1823) (The “defence and safety 

of the commonwealth depend upon having its citizens 

properly armed and taught the knowledge of military duty

. . . . [E]very of the said officers, non-commissioned officers, 

and privates, shall constantly keep the aforesaid arms, 

accoutrements and ammunition ready to be produced 

whenever called for by his commanding officer.”).

Those militia requirements were a far cry from a 

registration requirement for all firearms. Those laws 

therefore provide no meaningful support for D.C.’s broad and 

unprecedented registration law. Nor has D.C. been able to 

find any other historical antecedents for its registration 

requirement. Yet again, what the Supreme Court said in 

Heller with respect to D.C.’s handgun ban applies as well to 

D.C.’s registration requirement: “Few laws in the history of 

our Nation have come close to the severe restriction of the 

District’s” law. 554 U.S. at 629.

The Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in Miller further 

suggests that registration of all lawfully possessed guns is not 

permissible under the Second Amendment. See United States 

v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). Miller involved a defendant’s

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conviction for possessing an unregistered firearm. If 

registration were constitutionally permissible for all lawfully 

possessed guns, the Court could simply have affirmed the 

conviction on that ground. Instead, the Miller Court analyzed 

whether the kind of gun Miller possessed – a sawed-off 

shotgun – was within the class of weapons protected by the 

Second Amendment. The Court’s approach suggested that 

the government could require registration only of guns that 

were outside the protection of the Second Amendment –

namely, those classes of guns that the government had 

traditionally banned and that were not in common use, such as 

machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. Id. at 178; see also 

Heller, 554 U.S. at 622 (emphasizing that Miller turned on the 

“type of weapon at issue”) (emphasis omitted). After all, if 

registration could be required for all guns, the Court could 

have just said so and ended its analysis; there would have 

been no need to go to the trouble of considering whether the 

gun in question was the kind protected under the Second 

Amendment.

Perhaps recognizing the dearth of historical or 

precedential support for its registration law, D.C. says that 

licensing laws are “conceptually similar” to registration 

requirements. D.C. Br. at 19. D.C. also advances a similar 

argument when citing the record-keeping laws for sellers as 

support for its registration requirement. But to rely on those 

laws to support registration requirements on gun owners for 

all of their guns is to conduct the Heller analysis at an 

inappropriately high level of generality – akin to saying that 

because the government traditionally could prohibit 

defamation, it can also prohibit speech criticizing government 

officials.

D.C.’s law requiring registration of all lawfully possessed 

guns in D.C. is not part of the tradition of gun regulation in 

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the United States; it is the most stringent such law in the 

Nation; and it is significantly more onerous than traditional 

licensing requirements or record-keeping requirements 

imposed only on gun sellers. Registration requirements of the 

kind enacted by D.C. thus do not satisfy the Supreme Court’s

history- and tradition-based test.

Even if it were proper to apply strict or intermediate 

scrutiny to D.C.’s registration law (as the majority opinion 

does), the registration requirement still would run into serious 

constitutional problems. If we were applying one of those 

balancing tests, however, I would remand: The current record 

is insufficient to render a final evaluation of the registration 

law under those balancing tests.

To begin with, it would be hard to persuasively say that 

the government has an interest sufficiently weighty to justify

a regulation that infringes constitutionally guaranteed Second 

Amendment rights if the Federal Government and the states 

have not traditionally imposed – and even now do not 

commonly impose – such a regulation. Cf. Brown v. 

Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, 131 S. Ct. 2729, 2736 (2011) 

(considering First Amendment challenge to ban on sale of 

violent video games: “California’s argument would fare 

better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of 

specially restricting children’s access to depictions of 

violence, but there is none.”) (emphasis added); United States 

v. Stevens, 130 S. Ct. 1577, 1585 (2010) (considering First 

Amendment challenge to ban on depictions of animal cruelty: 

“we are unaware of any . . . tradition excluding depictions of 

animal cruelty from ‘the freedom of speech’ codified in the 

First Amendment”) (emphasis omitted); Romer v. Evans, 517 

U.S. 620, 633 (1996) (“It is not within our constitutional 

tradition to enact laws of this sort.”).

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Moreover, D.C.’s articulated basis for the registration 

requirement is that police officers, when approaching a house

to execute a search or arrest warrant or take other 

investigative steps, will know whether the residents have

guns. But that is at best a Swiss-cheese rationale because 

police officers obviously will assume the occupants might be 

armed regardless of what some central registration list might 

say. So this asserted rationale leaves far too many false 

negatives to satisfy strict or intermediate scrutiny with respect 

to burdens on a fundamental individual constitutional right.19

 19 Moreover, citizens may not be forced to register in order to 

exercise certain other constitutionally recognized fundamental 

rights, such as to publish a blog or have an abortion. See Volokh, 

Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Self-Defense, 56 

UCLA L. REV. at 1546 (discussing impermissibility of registration 

requirements applied to free speech and abortion rights). In 

concluding that D.C.’s handgun registration requirement might 

satisfy intermediate scrutiny, the majority opinion notes that the 

government may require registration for voting. See Maj. Op. at 

18. But those laws serve the significant government interest of 

preventing voter fraud. The majority opinion also cites car 

registration laws. Id. Of course, there is no enumerated 

constitutional right to own a car. Perhaps more to the point, those 

laws help prevent theft and assist recovery of stolen cars. No 

similar interest justifies gun registration laws.

D.C.’s registration law thus does not appear to be sufficiently 

tailored to advance a compelling or important government 

interest for purposes of the heightened scrutiny tests. That 

said, D.C. alludes to the possibility that other rationales might 

be asserted to support a registration requirement. Therefore,

Oddly, the majority opinion says that a registration 

requirement is permissible for handguns but might be 

impermissible for rifles or other long guns. See id. That approach 

gives potentially greater constitutional protection to long guns than 

to handguns even though Heller held that handguns warrant the 

highest constitutional protection.

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if I were applying a form of heightened scrutiny to the 

registration requirement, I would remand for further analysis 

of the interests that might be asserted. (It is possible, 

moreover, that the registration law might pass intermediate 

but not strict scrutiny.)

In any event, the proper test to apply is Heller’s historyand tradition-based test. Because most of the Nation has 

never required – and even now does not require – registration 

of all lawfully possessed firearms, D.C.’s strict registration 

law is not “longstanding” in the United States. After Heller, 

some licensing requirements remain permissible, and some 

record-keeping requirements on gun sellers remain 

permissible. But D.C.’s registration law violates the Second 

Amendment as construed by the Supreme Court.

* * *

This is a case where emotions run high on both sides of 

the policy issue because of the vital public safety interests at 

stake. As one who was born here, grew up in this community 

in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and has lived and worked 

in this area almost all of his life, I am acutely aware of the 

gun, drug, and gang violence that has plagued all of us. As a 

citizen, I certainly share the goal of Police Chief Cathy Lanier

to reduce and hopefully eliminate the senseless violence that 

has persisted for too long and harmed so many. And I greatly

respect the motivation behind the D.C. gun laws at issue in 

this case. So my view on how to analyze the constitutional 

question here under the relevant Supreme Court precedents is 

not to say that I think certain gun registration laws or laws 

regulating semi-automatic guns are necessarily a bad idea as a 

matter of policy. If our job were to decree what we think is 

the best policy, I would carefully consider the issues through 

that different lens and might well look favorably upon certain 

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regulations of this kind. But our task is to apply the 

Constitution and the precedents of the Supreme Court,

regardless of whether the result is one we agree with as a 

matter of first principles or policy. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 

U.S. 397, 420-21 (1989) (Kennedy, J., concurring) (“The hard 

fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. 

We make them because they are right, right in the sense that 

the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the 

result.”). A lower-court judge has a special obligation, 

moreover, to strictly and faithfully follow the lead of the “one 

supreme Court” established by our Constitution, regardless of 

whether the judge agrees or disagrees with the precedent.

D.C. believes that its law will help it fight violent crime. 

Few government responsibilities are more significant. That 

said, the Supreme Court has long made clear that the 

Constitution disables the government from employing certain 

means to prevent, deter, or detect violent crime. See, e.g.,

Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 

U.S. 436 (1966); City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32 

(2000); Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004); 

Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008); District of 

Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). In the words of the 

Supreme Court, the courts must enforce those constitutional 

rights even when they have “controversial public safety 

implications.” McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 

3045 (2010) (controlling opinion of Alito, J.).

As I read the relevant Supreme Court precedents, the 

D.C. ban on semi-automatic rifles and the D.C. gun 

registration requirement are unconstitutional and may not be 

enforced. We should reverse the judgment of the District 

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Court and remand for proceedings consistent with this 

opinion.20

 20 The D.C. ban on magazines of more than 10 rounds requires 

analysis in the first instance by the District Court. In order to apply 

Heller’s test to this prohibition, we must know whether magazines 

with more than 10 rounds have traditionally been banned and are 

not in common use. The parties here did not brief that question in 

much detail. Evidence presented to the District Court on the history 

and prevalence of magazines of more than 10 rounds would be 

helpful to the proper disposition of that issue under the Heller test. 

Therefore, I would remand to the District Court for analysis of that 

issue.

 I respectfully dissent.

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