Montgomery County Banned Guns in Churches. The DOJ Gave It a Day to Reverse Course. It Didn’t. So the DOJ Sued.
On August 3, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division sued Montgomery County, Maryland, alleging its newest gun ordinance is unconstitutional where it bars licensed carry permit holders from bringing a firearm inside — or within 100 yards of — a church, synagogue, mosque or other house of worship, even when the congregation itself wants an armed member on the property.
The complaint followed a blown deadline. Four days earlier, on July 30, a deputy assistant attorney general gave the county until noon the next day to confirm in writing it would not enforce the ban against houses of worship. The county said nothing. The DOJ sued the following Monday.
It is the third federal lawsuit filed against the same ordinance in four days — joining a synagogue’s own suit and a gun-rights group’s challenge — and nothing here has been decided by a court. This is what the government alleges, not what a judge has found.
- 100 yards the buffer Bill 23-26 draws around every “place of public assembly,” including houses of worship, inside which a valid carry permit stops working — Montgomery County Council, Expedited Bill 23-26
- 10–1 the County Council vote that passed the ordinance July 21 — the council has zero Republican members — Bethesda Magazine
- 121 antisemitic incidents the Anti-Defamation League recorded in Montgomery County in 2025, the security concern the county's own synagogue plaintiff cites against the ban — ADL, via The Baltimore Banner
According to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Montgomery County’s Expedited Bill 23-26 makes it, in the DOJ’s words, “almost impossible” for someone with a valid Maryland wear-and-carry permit to travel through the county without passing within 100 yards of a park, school, library, government building, polling place or house of worship — all zones where carrying a firearm is now alleged to be a county violation.
DOJ’s target is narrower than the whole ordinance. Deputy Assistant Attorney General R. Jonas Geissler sent county officials a letter on July 30 focused on one provision: the ban applies inside a house of worship even when the congregation itself has authorized an armed member on its own property. A synagogue that designates its own security, the complaint alleges, is committing a violation the moment that person carries — regardless of what the property owner wants.
This isn’t the county’s first version of this law, and a court has told it to rewrite this exact restriction before. On April 28, the Maryland Supreme Court ruled in Engage Armament LLC v. Montgomery County that the county’s prior firearms ordinance overstepped its authority: because state law lets permit holders carry across county lines on public highways, Montgomery County couldn’t extend its 100-yard buffer onto roads those permit holders were entitled to use. The court sent the case back down, and the county rewrote the law — not to loosen the restrictions, but to narrow their reach just enough to survive review while keeping the underlying buffer zones, including the one around houses of worship, intact.
The County Council passed the rewrite, Expedited Bill 23-26, on July 21 by a vote of 10 to 1. Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-District 7) sponsored it. The lone “no” came from Councilmember Laurie-Anne Sayles (D-At-Large), who objected to how the ban would be enforced and warned about over-policing — not because she wanted a weaker gun law. Every member of the Montgomery County Council is a Democrat; the panel has had no Republican member in years. County Executive Marc Elrich (D) signed the bill on July 27, and it took effect immediately.
County Executive Marc Elrich (D) signed Bill 23-26. The County Council that passed it, 10–1, has eleven members — all eleven are Democrats. Montgomery County has not elected a Republican to its council in years.
DOJ’s theory rests on two Supreme Court rulings decided four years apart. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Court held that modern gun laws must be justified by a comparable historical tradition of regulation, not by a government’s own judgment that a restriction sounds reasonable. In Wolford v. Lopez, decided June 25, 2026, the Court applied that test to Hawaii’s “sensitive places” law and struck down, 6–3 in an opinion by Justice Alito, the provision barring carry on private property open to the public without the owner’s express permission.
The DOJ complaint reads Wolford as fatal to Montgomery County’s houses-of-worship provision for the same reason: it bars carry even where the property owner has expressly granted permission. “History teaches us that houses of worship are vulnerable to armed attacks and congregants are particularly in need of the ability to defend themselves,” Geissler wrote in the July 30 letter. “By disarming religious congregants during worship, Montgomery County infringes on such congregants’ ability to defend against such attacks.” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump-appointed head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, added a First Amendment layer: because the ordinance singles out religious gatherings for a restriction the county doesn’t apply to comparable secular assemblies, the complaint alleges it burdens the free exercise of religion on top of the right to bear arms.
History teaches us that people are particularly vulnerable to armed attacks during worship. That is why @CivilRights Division @TheJusticeDept is acting quickly to challenge Montgomery Co., MD's law disarm congregants in houses of worship that permit firearms.
None of this is decided. Montgomery County had not filed a formal response to the DOJ complaint as of publication, and no federal judge has ruled on the merits of any of the three lawsuits now pending against Bill 23-26. Everything above is what the government and the plaintiffs allege, not what a court has found.
The DOJ suit is not the first challenge to Bill 23-26, and it is not even the first over houses of worship. On July 30 — the same day Geissler’s letter went out — the Silver Spring Jewish Center and its rabbi, J. Menashe Shapiro, sued Montgomery County, Elrich, Police Chief Marc Yamada and State’s Attorney John McCarthy over the same houses-of-worship ban, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Shapiro says his walk to synagogue passes within 100 yards of two public schools, a private school, two parks and three other houses of worship. “It really is just an irrational law that only serves to make it difficult for people in these particular places of worship to be able to defend themselves,” NCLA’s Jacob Huebert told JNS, adding that the synagogue is “pleased that the Justice Department is joining us in the fight.”
“Montgomery County's ordinance flies in the teeth of the Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment rulings. It boggles the mind that in the current antisemitic climate, the County would deny a synagogue the ability to defend worshippers as it sees fit.”
Jacob Huebert · Senior Litigation Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance · to JNS
A third suit, Barreto v. Montgomery County, was filed by Maryland Shall Issue — the state’s largest gun-rights group, led by President Mark W. Pennak — on behalf of lead plaintiff Julio Barreto and four other permit holders, challenging the ordinance’s broader “public assembly” zones as a maze of overlapping gun-free areas that effectively bans carry across most of the county’s urban core. Montgomery County has offered almost nothing in response to any of the three suits. A county spokeswoman’s only public comment: “The County does not comment on pending litigation.” Elrich, for his part, has defended the law’s intent without addressing the lawsuits directly — “our commitment to public safety has not changed,” he said, adding that the goal remains “to do everything we legally can to reduce gun violence and protect our communities.”
All three lawsuits — the DOJ’s, the synagogue’s, and Maryland Shall Issue’s — now sit in front of the same federal district court in Maryland, and none has a hearing date on the public record yet. The DOJ complaint asks the court to declare the houses-of-worship provision unconstitutional and enjoin its enforcement; the synagogue’s suit separately seeks a faster injunction. Unless and until a judge acts, Bill 23-26 remains the law, and carrying inside its buffer zones — houses of worship included — remains a violation on the books.
Montgomery County has rewritten this law once already, after losing at the Maryland Supreme Court in April. What’s different this time is that the federal government itself is now a plaintiff — arguing not that the county miscalculated a jurisdictional line, but that the underlying policy, disarming a congregation against its own wishes, cannot survive Bruen and Wolford at all.
This is pending litigation, not a settled outcome. The Justice Department alleges Montgomery County’s ban on carrying firearms in houses of worship — even with the congregation’s own permission — can’t survive the Supreme Court’s Bruen and Wolford rulings, and a synagogue and a gun-rights group are making overlapping arguments in two more federal suits. An all-Democratic County Council passed the law anyway, 10–1, three months after losing a related fight at the Maryland Supreme Court. No judge has ruled. The ordinance is still in effect.
