Back in February of this year I wrote the following regarding yet another lawsuit seeking concealed carry permits in which the Second Amendment Foundation is a plaintiff and attorney Alan Gura is its lawyer (Wrenn v. DC):
“The Second Amendment Foundation/Alan Gura filed a new lawsuit in an attempt to fix the mistakes made in the Palmer v. DC lawsuit. It is a new lawsuit with new and old mistakes. Here is a link to the Complaint. Here is the current internet archive of the docket. This is a concealed carry case. The SAF is not challenging the new DC ban on openly carrying firearms. Instead SAF seeks shall issue of concealed carry permits. This case has been assigned to the same judge in the Palmer v. DC district court case.
Given that SCOTUS doesn’t grant cert petitions unless there is a split between the circuits, if this case loses on appeal then it won’t create a circuit split and cert will once again be denied. Moreover, this is purely a concealed carry case which means that unless Gura wins either the appeal of his preliminary injunction or the appeal of final judgment then there is no circuit split and therefore no reason for SCOTUS to grant a cert petition.”
One of the many errors attorney Alan Gura made in this case which has now come back to bite him in the ass is his failure to make sure that the district court judge hearing his case actually had jurisdiction to hear the case.
This afternoon a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments in the appeal of a preliminary injunction issued by the district court judge. Very little was said about whether or not the Second Amendment applies outside the home. From what little time the court spent on the Constitutional question, the court of appeals was not very sympathetic to the lawyer for the District of Columbia’s argument that the bearing of arms can be banned everywhere
But before the court of appeals can make a decision on the merits of the case it must first decide whether or not the district court judge had the authority to issue the preliminary injunction in the first place. Although one should never predict the outcome of a case based on oral arguments, the appellate panel seemed to be unanimous in its opinion that the district court judge should not have been assigned to this particular case.
Attorney Alan Gura made a “Hail Mary” pass trying to save his case by essentially saying that he could have cured the defect in his case to which the court responded saying, in effect, that Mr. Gura “could have” fixed the defect in his case at any time since his case was first filed back in February but Mr. Gura failed to do so.
The silver lining is that the District of Columbia could have waited until this case was knocking on the door of the US Supreme Court a few years from now before making its jurisdictional challenge to the authority of the district court judge to hear the case.
There is likely to be a decision relatively shortly by the court of appeals vacating the preliminary injunction and kicking the case downstairs for reassignment to a new district court judge for a do-over (the case would start all over again, from the beginning).
This would give Mr. Gura the opportunity to fix the other defects in his lawsuit but as I noted back in February, Mr. Gura’s new-new concealed carry lawsuit will make the same mistakes as his old concealed carry lawsuit along with a host of new mistakes.
Mr. Gura should limit his lawsuits to challenging bans. Any half-competent lawyer can overturn a ban.
