The District of Columbia seems desperate in its attempt to have the district court dismiss a lawsuit challenging its ban on AR-15 rifles and other firearms. An April 1 response brief from the Justice Department’s Second Amendment Section provides a strong rebuttal for doing so, and even cites one of the more liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Justice Kagan, in her explicit support of the legality of AR-15, semi-automatic rifles.
The affirmative lawsuit was brought by the Justice Department’s Second Amendment Section in December of 2025, challenging the District’s ban on AR-15s, along with some pistols and shotguns, and its registration requirements. (The Second Amendment Section is the recently-formed Civil Rights Division group that focuses on Second Amendment issues and is led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.)
The April 1 response brief from the Second Amendment Section tells the court, “This case is straightforward,” and goes on to explain:
…Defendants and their Amici take umbrage with the fact that Section 12601 protects the fundamental constitutional right to keep and bear arms from law enforcement misconduct. Their desire to limit the statute’s protection to exclude a right that they disfavor, however, is not a valid ground to dismiss the United States’ Complaint.
The DOJ’s argument under Section 12601 is that the D.C. police have shown a pattern or practice of routinely enforcing a ban on guns that the Supreme Court says law-abiding people have a constitutional right to own for self-defense.
In support of the claim of constitutional protection, it ironically cites one of the most liberal Supreme Court Justices. Justice Kagan wrote in the recently litigated Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos case in support of America’s most popular rifle:
Finally, Mexico’s allegations about the manufacturers’ “design and marketing decisions” add nothing of consequence. As noted above, Mexico here focuses on the manufacturers’ production of “military style” “assault weapons,” among which it includes AR-15 rifles [and] AK-47 rifles. But those products are both widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers. (The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the country. See T. Gross, How the AR-15 Became the Bestselling Rifle in the U.S., NPR (Apr. 20, 2023.)). The manufacturers cannot be charged with assisting in criminal acts just because Mexican cartel members like those guns too.
The brief points out the district’s attempt to elude the common sense interpretation of the statute, “Defendants devote most of their brief (pages 1-31) to advancing a remarkable proposition: The text of Section 12601 does not really mean what it plainly says.”
The district recently took another loss with the overturn of its “large capacity magazine” ban in a March 5 precedential ruling.
As in Heller and Caetano, arms that are not dangerous AND unusual are protected by the ambit of the Second Amendment.