DOJ Sues Montgomery County Over 100-Yard Gun-Free Buffer Zones That Make It Almost Impossible to Legally Carry Down the Street

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

WASHINGTON, DC — The Justice Department sued Montgomery County, Maryland, on August 3, alleging that the county’s newly enacted Bill 23-26 violates the Second Amendment by barring licensed citizens from carrying firearms at thousands of locations and inside a 100-yard exclusion zone drawn around every one of them.

I covered the county’s rewrite in Montgomery County, MD Rewrites Gun Ordinance After Court Loss, Keeps 100-Yard Carry Ban Near Schools, Parks and Churches, when a courtroom defeat produced a redrafted ordinance instead of a retreat and the 100-yard buffer survived. What is new is the plaintiff. The federal government is now the one in court.

According to the Department’s announcement, the ordinance applies even when the person carrying is duly licensed and even when the property owner has given express consent. Think about what that second part means. A shop owner who wants an armed customer, a congregation that wants its own trained members armed inside its own building, a landlord who says yes in writing. The county overrides all of them.

“The Second Amendment does not allow local governments to ban law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms in public places as they go about their daily lives,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Montgomery County makes it almost impossible for a law-abiding citizen with a valid carry license to walk down the street and avoid these exclusion zones. The Civil Rights Division will not stand idle while Montgomery County tramples the rights guaranteed to law-abiding citizens by the Second Amendment.”

The legal hook is Wolford v. Lopez. The Department’s position is that the sheer breadth of Bill 23-26, the 100-yard rings included, makes it practically impossible to conduct ordinary daily business in Montgomery County while lawfully armed, which puts the ordinance in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s holding that a law banning carry in “places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines . . . hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”

The Department is asking a court to declare the law unconstitutional and to permanently enjoin the county and its law enforcement agencies from enforcing it, meaning a permanent court order that stops enforcement for good rather than a temporary pause while the case runs.

The NRA Institute for Legislative Action adds detail the Department’s release does not. The measure was passed as Expedited Bill 23-26 and took effect in late July. The categories it covers include houses of worship, schools, parks, libraries, recreation centers, government buildings, polling places and courthouses. Stack a 100-yard ring on each of those in a dense suburban county and the rings start touching. That is the practical argument, and it is not a hypothetical one for anyone who has ever mapped a commute against a gun-free zone.

NRA-ILA also notes that the Justice Department is not the only party in court against these restrictions. The Silver Spring Jewish Center and Rabbi J. Menashe Shapiro are challenging the county’s rules as applied to houses of worship, with the 100-yard zone at the center of the case, alleging violations of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, meaning the government cannot burden religious practice or dictate religious decisions, along with the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The effect of the ordinance, as NRA-ILA describes it, is to disarm congregants and a synagogue’s volunteer security team at a time when Jewish institutions are facing heightened threats of violence.

That is the part that should stop any armed citizen cold. A volunteer security team is a congregation looking at the threat environment honestly and deciding to take responsibility for its own people. An ordinance that shuts that down does not make the building safer. It just guarantees that everyone inside is waiting on someone else to arrive.

The stakes reach past one county line. NRA-ILA warns that an unfavorable ruling could serve as a road map for other Maryland jurisdictions, and that Maryland’s hard-won statewide carry permits lose their practical value if county after county layers on overlapping sensitive-place designations. Maryland is home to more than 600 houses of worship, by NRA-ILA’s count. A right that evaporates when you cross an invisible county boundary is not much of a right.

The Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section enforces the Second Amendment, the Police Pattern or Practice Act at 34 U.S.C. § 12601, and Executive Order 14206, and the Department’s release directs gun owners who believe a state or local government has infringed their rights to file a complaint through the Second Amendment Section.

More from USA Carry:

None of this is decided. It is a complaint, the county has not answered it, and Montgomery County will get its chance to defend the ordinance on the merits. What has changed is who the county has to answer to.

I will continue tracking the Justice Department’s suit against Montgomery County and the related challenge brought on behalf of the Silver Spring Jewish Center.