The defeat of a public housing gun ban in Cortland, N.Y.—as reported earlier by Ammoland News—was not the proverbial “first rodeo” for the Second Amendment Foundation on this subject, and the group’s track record by now should have been a warning flare to every such facility in the country they cannot stop the Bill of Rights at the front door.

Such battles have been erupting since at least 1995, when the National Rifle Association successfully challenged a public housing gun ban in Portland, Maine. The state’s highest court struck down that ban, which had existed for the previous two decades, according to the Roanoke Times, but at the time, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court “instead ruled 6-0 that the Portland Housing Authority has no authority under state law to regulate possession of guns.” Nowadays, there is firmer legal ground on which challenges can tread.

But it is SAF that has emerged as the powerhouse in such cases over the past several years, raising a question about whether housing authorities exist in a vacuum. After all, such court rulings can hardly be a mystery to people who manage public housing projects in any U.S. community.

East St. Louis, Illinois—In 2019, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the East St. Louis Housing Authority’s (ESLHA) ban on firearms possession by residents of government subsidized public housing in a case brought by SAF and the Illinois State Rifle Association in 2018. SAF and ISRA also teamed up in the landmark Supreme Court case of McDonald v. City of Chicago, decided in June 2010, which nullified the Chicago handgun ban and incorporated the Second Amendment to the states via the 14^th Amendment. SAF’s Alan Gottlieb has frequently observed that it was the McDonald ruling which opened the floodgates for litigation against onerous and unconstitutional gun control laws.

Warren County, Illinois—Back in 2012, SAF filed suit against the Warren County Housing Authority with Ronald G. Winbigler, a resident of Costello Terrace in Monmouth. He was a physically disabled former police officer who felt it necessary to keep a handgun in his residence for personal protection. In that case, SAF won a permanent injunction against the housing authority. This was seven years prior to the East St. Louis challenge, so perhaps it was a case of short memory span. The case was known as Winbigler v. Warren Co. Housing Authority.

Columbia, Tennessee—In 2022, SAF supported a case involving a man named Kinsley Braden. He had violated a gun ban at the Columbia Housing Authority, in which Tennessee Court of Appeals Judge Frank G. Clement, Jr. wrote, “(I)n light of the Supreme Court’s most recent decision in Bruen and keeping in mind the presumptively unconstitutional status of Columbia Housing’s policy based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller, we conclude that a total ban on the ability of law-abiding residents—like Mr. Braden—to possess a handgun within their public housing unit for the purpose of self-defense is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.”

Aside from the fact that SAF was involved in the three preceding cases, another name pops up: Attorney David Sigale, who has exhibited a talent for winning such cases.

Gun prohibitions in public housing should be considered a matter of settled law. Perhaps the mystifying element in all of these cases is how such gun bans keep showing up. As SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut observed in the latest victory over the Cortland Housing Authority, “At some point, it should become abundantly clear to various public housing authorities that gun bans are not allowed. Residents do not leave their constitutional rights at the entrance, as each of our victories over the years have affirmed.”

After winning the case in Warren County, Gottlieb issued a statement: “We brought this case because it was unconscionable, in the wake of our victory in McDonald v. City of Chicago, that a public entity in Illinois would engage in this kind of discrimination against a citizen. The WCHA has removed the lease provisions, and agreed that they were unconstitutional.”

“Unconscionable” is an interesting term. According to the Cornell Law School, “Unconscionable is an adjective that means without a conscience; unscrupulous; so unfair or unjust that it shocks the conscience. The adjective is frequently used in the context of contract law for contracts that have grossly oppressive and unfair terms. When a court finds a contract unconscionable, it is unenforceable.”

The courts so far evidently agree with Gottlieb’s assessment that gun bans in public housing amount to discrimination. As the cases mentioned here clarify, low income public housing residents have constitutional rights just like everyone else.

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