The home of the republic's national government, the District of Columbia, has had a municipal government that, for many years, has suffered from a serious lack of understanding of four very simple words: "shall not be infringed." Those words, of course, come from the Second Amendment, which states in part that the "...right of the people, to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
The Trump administration's Justice Department is now looking to correct that misunderstanding. The DOJ, on Monday, filed a lawsuit challenging the District's senseless "assault weapons" ban.
Fantastic!!! DOJ suing DC over unconstitutional firearm bans https://t.co/VXAxmuVrlo pic.twitter.com/BbaqTzo98o
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) December 22, 2025
The press release from the DOJ reads in part:
Today, the Justice Department sued the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), alleging that the District government and MPD unconstitutionally ban the AR-15 and many other firearms protected under the Second Amendment. The District’s gun laws require anyone seeking to own a gun to register it with D.C. Metro Police. However, the D.C. Code provides a broad registration ban on numerous firearms — an unconstitutional incursion into the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens seeking to own protected firearms for lawful purposes. MPD’s current pattern and practice of refusing to register protected firearms is forcing residents to sue to protect their rights and to risk facing wrongful arrest for lawfully possessing protected firearms.
In light of the Bruen decision, this seems an obvious next move for anyone who understands the Second Amendment. If anyone in this country, after all, should have the full and unfettered constitutional rights guaranteed to them, it should be people in the nation's capital.
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This isn't the first time the District has been sued over Second Amendment issues. One such case broke some serious ground in affirming the meaning of the Second Amendment; that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was precisely what the founders intended.
In 2003, a D.C. special policeman named Richard Heller sued Washington, D.C. because the laws at the time prevented him from owning a handgun and keeping it in his home for self-defense. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark decision Heller, held that the Second Amendment does, in fact, protect the rights of law-abiding citizens to own a semi-automatic weapon in their homes for lawful purposes, such as self-defense. Unfortunately, today, the District still prevents ownership of these very same weapons through a pattern and practice of broadly blocking gun registration. Law-abiding citizens throughout our nation’s capital are facing wrongful arrests due to the enforcement of unconstitutional laws.
The pro-gun community has been chalking up some pretty serious wins as of late. Personally, I'm something of a Second Amendment absolutist; I take "...shall not be infringed" literally, meaning that were I to have my druthers, I would be able to walk into a gun store and buy a Thompson submachine gun.
This case, of course, is just getting underway. But it's a fight that started with the Heller decision, and even if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, it should be fought right through to the end.
Stay tuned; we will be watching this case as it develops.
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