The federal judge who recently granted an injunction of Montgomery County, Maryland’s ban on lawful carry in houses of worship, at least as it applies to the Silver Spring Jewish Center and its rabbi who sued, now has another ask from the center and Rabbi J. Menashe Shapiro.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging several of the county’s “gun-free zones,” has filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow to reconsider her decision not to include other parts of Montgomery County in her injunction.
Specifically, NCLA and its clients want synagogue members, including Rabbi Shapiro, to be able to walk from their homes to the synagogue without fear of being arrested for carrying a sensitive place. Specifically, the plaintiffs are asking the judge halt enforcement of the county’s ban on firearms within 100 yards of “a place of public assembly.”
Reconsideration is warranted based on clear legal error. With respect to Montgomery County’s ban on carry within the synagogue, the Court properly concluded that Defendants failed to identify historical analogues justifying such a restriction. The same test should have applied with respect to the 100-yard rule. Instead, the Court shifted the burden to Plaintiffs under a pre-Bruen standard that has since been rejected by the circuit that created it. Under a Bruen analysis, the burden is Defendants’, and they cannot meet that burden.
It’s an interesting argument. Normally, asking a federal judge for a do over and telling her she got it wrong the first time wouldn’t get attorneys or their clients very far. In all honesty, I’m not sure it’s going to persuade Chasanow that she erred in not granting an injunction against the 100-yard “buffer zone.”
In her opinion, the judge said that SSJC and Rabbi Shapiro brought a facial challenge against the “buffer zone” carry ban, which meant that there could be no application of the law that could be constitutionally valid. Chasanow disputed that, pointing to schools as one area where “buffer zones” are likely constitutional.
But Chasanow didn’t ask the county to come up with historical analogies to justify the “buffer zone” ban. Instead, she argued that the Supreme Court essentially blessed buffer zones around “sensitive places” in Bruen.
Roughly half of the places of public assembly as defined by Section 57-1—from which 100-yard buffers extend under Section 57-11(a)—likely are constitutional under the sensitive place doctrine (i.e.¸ schools; government buildings open to the public for the business of government or community use; polling places; courthouses; and legislative assemblies). The Court has suggested that schools, government buildings, polling places, courthouses, and legislative assemblies were “sensitive places” where firearms could be banned.
But the Court said nothing at all about banning lawful carry 100 yards in any direction from one of these locations. If 100 yards is okay, what about 200? 500? 1000? It should still be up to Montgomery County to produce analogues to “gun-free zones” that extend beyond the property of the sensitive place itself, and she didn’t require the county to do so.
Again, I don’t know that the judge is going to reconsider her earlier decision just because NCLA says she made a clear error, or because the plaintiffs believe there’s an urgent need for relief given that “the Jewish holidays of Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah begin September 25 and October 2, 2026, respectively, and both fall within the period surrounding the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attacks.”
The NCLA definitely makes a good point, though, and if Chasanow won’t listen to it then maybe the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court will.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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