Maryland’s requirement that people demonstrate a “good and substantial reason” to obtain a handgun permit is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The government infringed on citizens’ rights by requiring Marylanders to provide a reason to carry a handgun outside the home because the requirement isn’t narrowly tailored to the state’s public-safety interests, according to the opinion by U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg.
Legg wrote that the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends beyond the home.
“A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” the opinion says. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”
Raymond Woollard filed the lawsuit in federal court in Baltimore in 2010 after an application to renew his handgun permit was denied. He obtained the permit after an intruder broke into his Baltimore County home in 2002 and renewed it shortly after the man — Woollard’s son-in-law — was released from prison. But a second renewal was denied in 2009 because he failed “to verify threats occurring beyond his residence,” the suit says.
Legg ruled that Maryland improperly put the burden on citizens to show they needed a permit.
“They cannot demand that people prove some special need to exercise their rights,” said Alan Gura, an attorney for Wollard who won Supreme Court rulings striking down handgun laws in the District and Chicago.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Fader said that his office disagreed with the ruling and would appeal.
Maryland’s law required handgun-permit applicants to show that a “permit is necessary as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.”
Legg called the requirement “overly broad” because its goal was simply to reduce the number of handguns carried outside the home.
“A law that burdens the exercise of an enumerated constitutional right by simply making that right more difficult to exercise cannot be considered ‘reasonably adapted’ to a government interest, no matter how substantial that interest may be,” he wrote.
Gun-control groups criticized the ruling. Jonathan Lowy, director of the legal action project for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said states are justified in restricting who can possess firearms in public.
Even in the decisions overturning D.C.’s and Chicago’s handgun bans, “nowhere did the Supreme Court suggest that there was a right to carry loaded guns in public,” Lowy said.
