The Justice Department is challenging the constitutionality of a Montgomery County ordinance that prohibits carrying firearms throughout a significant portion of the county.
The DOJ’s Aug. 3 complaint, filed in federal court in Maryland, alleges that Montgomery County Bill 23-26 violates the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms. Formally titled “Restrictions on Ghost Guns Near Minors and Carrying of Firearms in or Near Places of Public Assembly,” the ordinance bans carrying firearms in a long list of places where residents and visitors gather — parks, places of worship, schools, libraries, and recreational and exhibition facilities — regardless of whether those places are publicly or privately owned. The law also prohibits carrying within 100 yards of those locations.
According to the DOJ, these “Exclusion Zones” cover a vast area of the county. The complaint cites, as examples, Montgomery County’s 605 houses of worship, 693 public parks and 42 public recreation centers. “Not surprisingly, this comprehensive ban on firearms prevents citizens from possessing firearms as a practical matter throughout most of the public (and many private) spaces in Montgomery County as they go about their daily lives,” the DOJ alleges. The restrictions apply even to people with a valid carry permit, and even when the property owner consents.
In written testimony opposing the bill before the County Council, Mark Pennak, president of Maryland Shall Issue, argued that “the 100-yard zones for each of these places often encompass ordinary places of commerce and associated public sidewalks,” including grocery stores, banks and medical facilities — private places where, he said, “people do not ‘assemble.'” Pennak testified that the restrictions “burden permit holders, including the many who reside outside the County but drive within it, with the choice of significant travel restrictions or regularly yielding their benefits as permit holders.” Karan Singh, another resident who testified against the bill, argued it would disproportionately affect minority communities: “Black and Brown residents are disproportionately concentrated in high-density mid- and down-county regions… By blanketing places within 100 yards of public assemblies with strict criminal penalties, you turn dense minority neighborhoods into legal minefields for local permit holders.”
Bill 23-26 was passed by the County Council on July 21 and signed into law July 27 by County Executive Marc Elrich, a Democrat, with Councilmember Dawn Luedtke as lead sponsor. The county has said the measure was crafted specifically to bring its firearm ordinance into compliance with an April 28 ruling by the Maryland Supreme Court in Engage Armament LLC v. Montgomery County, while preserving what officials describe as the strongest firearm restrictions still allowed under state law. A county spokeswoman told the Daily Caller News Foundation the county does not comment on pending litigation.
That April ruling struck down parts of the county’s earlier ordinance because it defined “place of public assembly” too broadly — including hospitals, community health centers, long-term care facilities, childcare facilities, government buildings, and any “gathering of individuals without regard to the place in which they are gathering.” The unanimous court’s decision wasn’t based on Second Amendment grounds; instead, it held that Maryland law “authorizes local regulation of firearms… with respect to minors and within 100 yards of or in a park, church, school, public building, and other place of public assembly.”
The DOJ’s complaint leans heavily on a different ruling: the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Wolford v. Lopez, which struck down a similar Hawaii carry restriction on Second Amendment grounds. “This law,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote of the Hawaii law, “departs sharply from the standard common-law rule on access to private property held open to the public… When these permit holders leave home in the morning, not only must they take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines,” which “hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”
The DOJ argues Montgomery County’s ordinance “suffers from the same defect.” In its motion to preliminarily enjoin the law, the department wrote that “the enormous scope of the Exclusion Zone makes it almost impossible for a citizen to walk through town to shop, to dine, or engage in any other common activity of daily life without likely entering the Exclusion Zone multiple times in a single trip and thereby becoming a criminal without ever intending to do so.” The complaint separately argues the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in Kipke v. Moore, which came to a different conclusion, “was wrongly decided” and should be overturned.
“The Second Amendment does not allow local governments to ban law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms in public places as they go about their daily lives,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Montgomery County makes it almost impossible for a law-abiding citizen with a valid carry license to walk down the street and avoid these exclusion zones.”
Montgomery County will have an opportunity to respond in court. The claims in the DOJ’s complaint remain allegations at this stage.
