Pat Dollard

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The Swamp:

Following last month’s historic gun-rights ruling by the Supreme Court, the District of Columbia’s council is poised Tuesday to vote on emergency legislation that would allow residents to register and keep handguns in their homes.

But the lawyer who brought down the city’s 32-year-old ban on handguns said the proposed D.C. law doesn’t go far enough and he’s prepared to file suit again.

Alan Gura, a Virginia lawyer who filed the lawsuit in the case known as District of Columbia v. Heller told the Washington Post that the new regulations don’t allow for semiautomatic handguns.

“The semiautomatic ban is clearly unconstitutional,” Gura said. “The overwhelming majority of handguns people use in the United States are semiautomatic.”

Another potential problem: Several members of the council support language in the legislation that would require the weapons to be unloaded, disassembled or trigger-locked, except when there is a “threat of immediate harm to a person” in the home.

That could render the law vulnerable according to the Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia. It suggested that Americans have a constitutional right to a working handgun in the home for self-defense and appeared to frown on such devices as trigger-locks. The court split 5-4 on the issue in June.

But because the opinion was less than crystal clear on the subject, expect a few more years of litigation, both in Washington and in other cities such as Chicago, where lawsuits challenging that city’s long-standing handgun ban have already been filed.