One of the seminal cases regarding gun rights, District of Columbia v. Heller obligated the Supreme Court to weigh in on a series of provisions enforced in the District of Columbia Code that barred the district’s residents from carrying unregistered firearms and banned registering handguns. Gunowners were also obligated to keep their lawfully registered firearms unloaded and disassembled or made unusable by a trigger lock. Under certain conditions, the district’s chief of police could issue a one-year license for handguns. Dick Heller, a police officer in the District of Columbia, sought such a license but was denied. Heller then sued the district, insisting that its code violated rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment, specifically that one could keep an operational firearm in one’s residence without a license. While the district court opted to dismiss the complaint, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declared that the district’s condition that firearms kept in a home be nonoperational violated the Second Amendment right to keep firearms in a household for the purpose of self-protection.