The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today ruled that several parts of the District’s gun registration law violate the Second Amendment. The court held the following provisions unconstitutional:

• registered guns be re-registered every three years.
• a gun must be physically brought to the D.C. police headquarters in order to registered.
• persons seeking to register a gun must pass a test about firearms laws.
• prohibition on registering more than one handgun per month.

At the same time, the court upheld other requirements, including that gun owners be fingerprinted and photographed.

The opinion was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg, and joined by Judge Patricia Millett. Judge Ginsburg was appointed by President Reagan in 1986, and Judge Millett was appointed by President Obama in 2013. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson dissented. She was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. She had previously dissented in the 2007 case that ruled the D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional, Parker v. District of Columbia. The majority opinion in that case was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller.

Today’s decision involved the same lead plaintiff, Dick Anthony Heller, as the Supreme Court case. The plaintiffs were represented by Stephen Halbrook, who has previously won four Supreme Court cases involving gun control laws.  Among those victories was the parallel cases of McDonald v. Chicago and NRA v. Oak Park, which were jointly decided by the Supreme Court in 2010, making the Second Amendment applicable to state and local governments. Halbrook represented the NRA, as he has done in many previous cases.

In evaluating the constitutionality of D.C.’s firearms laws, the court applied “intermediate scrutiny.” The test asks whether a law “promotes a substantial governmental interest that would be achieved less effectively absent the regulation,” and whether “the means chosen are not substantially broader than necessary to achieve that interest.”