Court Opinion

ID: 9498120
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:08:42.345602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:38.047194
License: Public Domain

GINSBURG, Chief Judge,
concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc.
The court properly denies the appellants’ petition for rehearing because this case does not present a circumstance in which a plaintiff is “required to await and undergo a criminal prosecution as the sole means of seeking relief.” Babbitt v. United Farm Workers Nat’l Union, 442 U.S. 289, 298, 99 S.Ct. 2301, 60 L.Ed.2d 895 (1979). The plaintiffs challenging the pistol regulation, as both the panel and the district court observed, see 396 F.3d 1248, 1256 (D.C.Cir.2005); 297 F.Supp.2d 201, 216-17 (D.D.C.2004), could have applied to register a pistol and then challenged the subsequent denial of that application on the basis of the Second Amendment in the courts of the District of Columbia, see generally D.C. CODE §§ 2-510(a), 7-2502.10(b), 7-2507.09; Fesjian v. Jefferson, 399 A.2d 861, 863 (D.C.1979) (entertaining challenges under the Equal Protection Clause and the Takings Clause to D.C. gun statute upon appeal from denial of registration), and thereafter, if necessary in the Supreme Court of the United States, see 28 U.S.C. § 1257. Because the appellants have, as the Government argues, a ready means of presenting their constitutional challenge, it cannot fairly be said that a criminal prosecution is their “sole means of seeking relief.”
*2Although the plaintiff challenging the trigger lock regulation apparently had no administrative remedy by way of which she could secure judicial review, her claim to standing is based only upon her averment that but for the regulation “she would remove the trigger lock when she deems it necessary to defend herself in her home.” Seegars, 396 F.3d at 1256. That she would ever find it necessary to remove the trigger lock in order to defend herself in her home, and that she would then be prosecuted for that action, are highly speculative propositions, and therefore insufficient to give her standing to sue. See Whitmore v. Arkansas, 495 U.S. 149, 158, 110 S.Ct. 1717, 109 L.Ed.2d 135 (1990) (“Allegations of possible future injury do not satisfy the requirements of Art. III. A threatened injury must be certainly impending to constitute injury in fact.”).