This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 3rd, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC has thrown out the DC government's rules preventing most people from carrying guns.

The ruling comes in a pair of cases.

So what does it mean for law-abiding people in the District of Columbia?

Alan Gura is an attorney who argued before the court on this matter,

he comments.

Before this case, what did we understand

about the individual right to keep and bear arms as applied in Washington, D.C.

People understand what they want to understand about the right to bear arms and the right to carry a gun out in public for self-defense. In the Heller case, the Supreme Court

actually was called upon to decide the meaning of the term bear arms because the city in trying to defend Washington DC's handgun ban

had this argument which held that to bear arms had an exclusively militaristic idiomatic meaning

meaning to soldier or to go into battle and this according to the city meant

that the right to keep and bear arms was only a right of

people engaged in some sort of military activity.

So to resolve that question the Supreme Court in Heller went through an extended

discussion of what it meant to the framers to bear arms.

And they surveyed a great deal of history and came up with a definition which was more or less that to bear arms as it's used in the Second Amendment is to wear bear or, or bear, or on your person or in a pocket or in a clothing,

arms for the purposes of being armed and ready

in case of conflict with another person. That definition actually was not created initially

by the Heller court. That language was borrowed from Justice Ginsburg's opinion, dissenting in an earlier case where for whatever reason

possessed the justice, she decided to define the meaning of bare arms in the Second Amendment.

And so the Supreme Court in Heller said,

...