This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 26, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Heller case gave gun rights advocates a solid victory, but it shouldn't be taken as a final victory.

From Brian Doherty, author of the new Cato book, Gun Control on Trial.

In it, he details what led up to the biggest gun case in at least 70 years and its immediate aftermath.

D.C. was extremely reluctant to react to the Heller decision. Of course they were ordered by the

Supreme Court that their complete ban on usable weapons in the home was a

violation of the Second Amendment and it had to stop.

But they were slow to grant their citizens this right.

The first thing they tried to do was maintain their extremely eccentric definition of a machine gun, which of course remained banned even after Heller to include any weapon that could even in theory except a clip with more than 10 rounds.

This pretty much meant that only revolvers or single shot Derringers could be legally

registered in DC even after Heller.

They also were continuing to maintain

that you couldn't really load your legally

registered weapon unless you were under imminent threat basically until some intruder

had crossed your threshold it would have been illegal to load your gun.

This actually caused Dick Heller the winning plaintiff in the Heller case, to feel that his right to not been completely vindicated and to file another lawsuit against DC.

In the face of this and in the face of congressional pressure, the Federal

Congress was contemplating overturning DC's gun laws on its own, DC finally grudgingly gave in

in mid-September and now citizens in DC can

legally register and keep loaded in their home any pistol including a

semi-automatic pistol.

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