Gun control advocates encouraged by recent court rulings

They have been on a losing streak in the lower courts.

The activists found the holy grail in 2008, when the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller said the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to own a firearm unconnected to military service.

The court followed it up with McDonald v. Chicago two years later, holding that the amendment applies not just to gun control laws passed by Congress but to local and state laws as well.

The decisions were seen as a green light to challenge gun restrictions across the country, and the lawsuits have come raining down - more than two a week, according to the antigun Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

But it is the Brady Center that is crowing about the results.

“Three years and more than 400 legal challenges later, courts - so far - have held that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller was narrow and limited, and that the Second Amendment does not interfere with the people’s right to enact legislation protecting families and communities from gun violence,’’ the center said in a report optimistically titled “Hollow Victory?’’

Even those challenging gun restrictions acknowledge that the courts have been unwilling to expand on the basic right that most people agree Heller bestowed: the ability to keep a handgun in one’s home for self-defense purposes.

The subsequent rulings “clearly highlight the struggles lower courts are having after receiving the Supreme Court’s guidance in Heller and McDonald,’’ said Antigone Peyton, a lawyer in Alexandria, Va.

“They’re afraid to be out front on the law.’’

As Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, put it: “If the Supreme Court . . . meant its holding to extend beyond home possession, it will need to say so more plainly.’’

If the court has more to say, two men from opposite sides of the Potomac River are hoping the justices will accept their cases in order to do so.

In the Maryland case, Charles F. Williams Jr. is challenging his 2008 conviction in Prince George’s County of violating the state’s prohibition on wearing, carrying, or transporting a firearm in public without a permit. Williams had his legally acquired gun in a bag as he traveled from his girlfriend’s home to his own.

Williams acknowledges that he had not applied for a permit. But his attorney, Stephen Halbrook, says that should not matter: The Maryland law is so restrictive that it “basically says ordinary people can’t get one.’’ He argues in his petition that the law violates the Supreme Court’s “analyses and plain statements in Heller and McDonald that the right to bear arms exists outside the home.’’

Peyton represents Sean Masciandaro, a reptile wrangler from Woodbridge, who was convicted of violating a ban on having a loaded firearm in a vehicle on national parkland.

Masciandaro, who puts on educational demonstrations as owner of Raging Reptiles, said he was exhausted from traveling when he pulled off George Washington Memorial Parkway to take a nap at Daingerfield Island near Reagan National Airport.

A Park Police officer noticed him illegally parked, woke Masciandaro, and, seeing a knife under his seat, asked if he had other weapons.

Masciandaro said there was a loaded handgun in a bag in his trunk. (Masciandaro said the gun was for protection from people, not his animals, which travel separately.)

Masciandaro was convicted and paid a fine but argues in his petition to the court: “If there is a Second Amendment right outside the home, it surely applies to law-abiding citizens carrying handguns for self-defense while traveling on public highways.’’

He is appealing a decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which said any expansion of the right in the Heller decision would have to come from the Supreme Court.