On February 2, 2026, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro appeared as a guest on her former network and stated: “You bring a gun into the district, you mark my words, you’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else…You bring a gun into this district, count on going to jail and hope you get the gun back.”These statements have caused outrage among supporters of the Second Amendment and for good reason.However, there is a lot of misinformation online about what US Attorney Pirro said, what the comments mean, and how her office is actually enforcing gun laws in the District of Columbia. Its actually worse than how many advocates of the Second Amendment are interpreting it. United States Attorney Pirro is using the District’s bail statute to punish out of state law abiding gun owners who visit the District unaware of the city’s draconian gun laws and she confirmed that fact on Fox news yesterday.
D.C.’s Strict Gun Laws
Her statements on Fox yesterday confirm what many D.C. criminal defense lawyers have feared since she was elevated from cable news talking head to the District’s chief law enforcement officer. She is using the District’s Bail Reform Statute, not to protect the community in these cases, but rather to inflict punishment on lawful gun owners for paperwork crimes.First, its important to understand the context in which she’s speaking: “I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.” We first wrote about the common unfortunate scenario where gun-owning out of state visitors come to D.C. for tourism or otherwise and end up leaving with a criminal record almost twelve years ago. Five years ago, we posted a video explaining how to lawfully transport a firearm through D.C. to help anyone who sees it avoid this not so uncommon fate for law abiding gun owners traveling to or through D.C.The gist of it is that many law abiding citizens with proper out of state concealed carry permits come to D.C. without understanding that District law, among other restrictions, does not give carry permit reciprocity to any state, requires registration of all firearms, criminalizes the possession of bullets unless they belong to registered firearms, and up until 2014 categorically prohibited carrying outside the home.Law abiding citizen visitors who run afoul of D.C. gun laws get arrested so frequently my small firm has an entire practice area devoted to it. In addition, I was previously involved in a successful 5.1 million dollar Second Amendment class action suit against the District on behalf of law abiding out of state gun owners who were prosecuted after a federal judge struck down D.C. ‘s then-absolute ban on carrying outside the home. So, when U.S. Attorney Pirro claims she doesn’t “care if you have a license” somewhere else or that “you’re a law abiding citizen” she is speaking directly to the folks we’ve been representing and writing about for over a decade. And this is how its playing out in D.C. Superior Court:
Prosecutors Must Ask For Pretrial Detention
So, how is her policy different from previous administrations as well as former Trump admin 2.0 Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin? She is making sure these same folks spend up to three days in jail upon arrest. Its complicated but basically D.C. does not have cash bail. It has a Bail Reform Act modeled after a similar federal statute which deems certain offenses “dangerous” or a “crime of violence” that create a presumption for pretrial detention. If a defendant is charged with one of these enumerated offenses, the presentment judge has almost no discretion to deny the government’s request for up to a three day hold in jail.Carrying a pistol without a license (“CPWL”) in D.C. is a felony offense that carries such a presumption. The only constitutional application of the bail statute is its stated purpose to “protect the community” from otherwise dangerous defendants. If it were permitted to be used as punishment, it would be unconstitutional (hello, presumption of innocence). How this plays out practically: You take a road trip with your family to D.C. for vacation. You get pulled over and immediately tell D.C. police (MPD) that you have a firearm in the vehicle or you leave it in your hotel room and accidentally forget it and rush back to pick it up, or you simply park your car and Secret Service, MPD, or Park Police go fishing for guns in cars, or you walk through a metal detector at a museum having forgotten its still in your purse. Next thing you know you are put in cuffs and have to spend the night in Central Cellblock in a cockroach infested cell equipped with a metal bed and toilet. Your only meal is a moldy bologna sandwich. You finally see a judge the next afternoon (or two nights later if arrested on Saturday) sometimes after 2:00 pm shackled from wrist to waist to ankle.You think finally you will be released but instead you hear an Assistant United States Attorney ask the Court for a (b)(1)(A) hold due to the CPWL charge. If the judge finds “probable cause” for the offense, which almost always occurs, the judge then has no discretion to release you. You can then be held up to three days before your lawyer has the next opportunity to make arguments for your release at the Preliminary Hearing.The primary difference between Pirro and her predecessors is that she has instituted a policy across the board where a line prosecutor must ask for these holds in all gun cases–whether the defendant has a ten page rap sheet or is a Sunday school teacher with no criminal record, a valid North Carolina gun permit, and came to see the sights in our nation’s beautiful capitol mistakenly assuming the Second Amendment protects them here. Previous U.S. attorneys in D.C. often made the decision to request the hold in these cases discretionary for individual prosecutors and most prosecutors exercised that discretion reasonably and fairly. Not anymore!And that’s it: bring a gun to D.C. and you’ll go to jail regardless of whether you are law abiding and have a permit from out of state–at least for three days and at least while U.S. Attorney Pirro calls the shots. Take it from an experienced DC gun lawyer, you should heed her advice, unless you like moldy bologna sandwiches.