In June 2025, Lorenzo Redman was sentenced to 18 months in a D.C. prison after he was convicted of possessing a gun as a felon. His public defender filed an appeal.
But that appeal wasn’t based on a procedural mistake or legal technicality. Rather, his attorney argued that in disarming felons, D.C. has been violating the Second Amendment.
Redman’s case — one of two pending before the D.C. Court of Appeals that challenges the District’s felon-in-possession law — is an example of what has become a legal assault on the city’s restrictive gun laws, including litigation around D.C.’s ban on high-powered rifles and high-capacity magazines.
Similar legal challenges have been percolating in courts across the country, and at least one will be heard later this year by the Supreme Court.
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Proponents say they’re merely taking the path opened by the Supreme Court in 2008, when it overturned D.C.’s absolute ban on handgun ownership, and later in 2022, when it significantly raised the bar for gun restrictions to comply with the Second Amendment.
“The court has made clear the Second Amendment won’t be treated as a second-class right anymore,” said Clark Neily, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute and attorney who worked on the 2008 case that tossed out D.C.’s handgun ban.
But critics worry that the current litigation, if successful, will usher in an era of even more high-powered guns on the city’s streets, leading to more deaths. (D.C. police estimate that roughly three-quarters of the city’s homicides involve guns. As of September 1, 1,789 illegal guns have been recovered by police in 2026.)
“The weakening of our gun laws is only going to make public safety more difficult,” said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.
In some cases, the Trump administration has led the charge against D.C.’s gun laws, while at the same time aggressively pushing to improve public safety in the city.
Last year, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said her office, which prosecutes most violent crime in the city, would no longer charge people for carrying a rifle or a shotgun or for possessing magazines that can hold more than 10 bullets in them, arguing the laws prohibiting them conflicted with the administration’s pro-gun agenda and were likely unconstitutional.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb has argued the ban helps prevent mass casualties when shootings happen. But earlier this year, a panel of judges on the D.C. Court of Appeals disagreed with him, declaring that the city’s ban on high-capacity magazines is unconstitutional.
The Trump administration has also sued D.C. over its ban on AR-15 assault rifles, calling it an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment right of individuals to bear arms.
Both that case and further appeals in litigation involving high-capacity magazines are now on hold, because the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case later this year involving similar bans on assault rifles across the country.
Much of this litigation has stemmed from the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which says only gun restrictions that have some equivalent in American history or tradition can survive constitutional scrutiny.
“We saw an absolute explosion of litigation in the wake of the Bruen decision, where the governing standard for the Second Amendment claims was rejected and the court announced this new history and tradition test,” said Billy Clark, the associate litigation director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The Bruen decision has been cited in challenges to D.C.’s ban on high-capacity magazines, and it’s the central argument in Redman’s appeal of his conviction for possessing a gun as a felon. “There is no historical precedent for permanently disarming a person based solely on a past conviction for a crime punishable by more than one year in prison,” his public defenders argued in a brief to the Court of Appeals this month.
Since Pirro’s office prosecuted Redman, it will be left to them to decide whether to defend D.C.’s felon-in-possession law. “U.S. Attorney Pirro will always fight to keep illegal firearms out of the hands of dangerous felons,” a spokesperson said in an email.
The issue may also be destined for the Supreme Court, though, as multiple federal courts have split on whether felons should be banned from owning guns. Neily said he could see a ruling, whether from the Supreme Court or the D.C. Court of Appeals, that keeps some restrictions in place while tossing out a categorical ban.
“If you just say ‘felon in possession’ you think of a scary person who stuck up a liquor store, and it’s not hard to think they should not have a gun,” he said. “But there’s a guy in Pennsylvania who was convicted of food stamp fraud in the mid-1990s, never went to jail, and is prohibited from owning a gun for life. That’s bonkers.”
In Redman’s case, his initial felony charge in D.C. was for carrying a gun without a license. But he’s also facing armed robbery and assault charges in Maryland.
For Mendelson, the arguments against D.C.’s gun laws fail to capture the real issues facing cities struggling to keep residents safe.
“I don’t believe the founding fathers had a scintilla of thought of semi-automatic pistols or automatic weapons or felons in possession,” he told NOTUS. “They were thinking of muskets. Really, George Washington would travel some of our streets and say this is OK?”
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