This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The D.C. City Council has done its best to maintain an effective ban on functional firearms in the District of Columbia.

The DC Circuit disagrees striking down many of those restrictions in the wake of the Heller decision

at the Supreme Court, and because of its plaintiff, the case is being called Heller 2.

I spoke with Cato Associate Policy analyst Dave Koppel about the case this week.

The DC Council of course lost the major US Supreme Court case of District of Columbia versus Heller in 2008

when the US Supreme Court decided that DC cannot ban handguns.

Since then DC has DC cannot ban handguns.

Since then, DC has complied with the Supreme Court's new rules about the Second Amendment

with all the enthusiasm of a racist school board in Alabama desegregating

itself pursuant to the Supreme Court's Brown versus Board decision in 1954,

which means they are doing everything they can to claim they are in compliance in some kind of technical way,

but have really been engaged in a campaign of massive resistance

ever since 2008.

It is to some degree understandable that DC would look at the Heller decision

affirming an individual right to keep and bear arms and say well how close to what we had before can we get now?

Well, that's right.

And another analog is after the Civil War, the unreconstructed Confederate states recognized that slavery as a legal institution

had to go.

They'd fought a war, 600,000 people died, they were on the losing side of the war, so you were not going to have formal

legal slavery anymore.

...