Longtime CNN and Headline News anchor Lynne Russell, who survived an armed robbery along with her husband and former Special Forces soldier Chuck De Caro, himself a former CNN correspondent, is leading a major challenge to a gun law in Washington, D.C.
According to a column by legal expert Jonathan Turley, “Russell is challenging the city’s prohibition on ‘off-body’ carrying of weapons, including keeping a handgun in a purse,” adding, “That type of off-body carry is precisely what may have saved Russell’s life in a shootout with an armed assailant in 2015.”
He went on to explain that she was forced at gunpoint into her and her husband’s hotel room by an armed robber in Albuquerque, N.M. After entering, the robber threw her across the room just as De Caro was coming out of the shower.
“Russell then had the amazing calmness and control to suggest to her husband that there might be something in her purse that the man would want. Inside was her gun and De Caro pulled it out and exchanged fire with the man,” Turley wrote, adding that De Caro was shot several times but survived, while the assailant did not.
“Both Russell and De Caro showed amazing courage. The fact that De Caro could come out of a shower naked and immediately engage a gunman in a shootout is worthy of a Die Hard sequel,” Turley noted.
Now, he says, she is challenging D.C. Municipal Regulation § 24-2344.1 and § 24-2344.2, which states:
2344.1A licensee shall carry any pistol in a manner that it is entirely hidden from view of the public when carried on or about a person, or when in a vehicle in such a way as it is entirely hidden from view of the public.
2344.2A licensee shall carry any pistol in a holster on their person in a firmly secure manner that is reasonably designed to prevent loss, theft, or accidental discharge of the pistol.
Turley wrote that, given recent Supreme Court decisions regarding Second Amendment rights, Russell’s challenge to be allowed to carry a firearm “off-body” is “quite strong,” in his view. “[I]t will be difficult for the District to show historical support for limiting gun rights to on-body-carry situations,” he wrote.
The Court, in Bruen, held that “when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.” To overcome that presumption, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
“It is doubtful that any early gun laws barred carrying weapons off body. Indeed, the most common weapons like muskets necessarily were carried on horseback or kept at arm’s reach,” he noted further.
Turley added:
I have previously written how New York, D.C., and Chicago are examples of Democratic cities that routinely commit lasting self-inflicted wounds to gun control efforts with poorly conceived and poorly drafted measures.
In 2008, the District of Columbia brought us District of Columbia v. Heller, the watershed decision declaring that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of gun possession.
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In 2010, Chicago brought us McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the Court declared that that right is incorporated against state and local government.
“These cities are the gifts that keep on giving for gun rights advocates. Politically, local officials are heralded for any gun control legislation and they are rarely blamed for major losses that come later in the courts — losses that often expand the reach of prior cases,” he said.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of a federal law that bans the possession of a gun by someone who has been the subject of a domestic violence restraining order. The vote is 8-1 with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
“The court holds that when an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment,” SCOTUS Blog reported.
