Nearly three years after the United States Supreme Court overturned the D.C.
ban on handguns, residents of the District can no longer register guns in the city.

A temporary, de facto ban is in place because the one man who could facilitate handgun ownership in the nation's capital has stopped taking registration orders.

Since the lifting of the handgun ban in June 2008, Charles Sykes has processed more than 1,000 handguns for District residents. Sykes tells WTOP he's stopped taking orders for now.

"I've lost my lease," Sykes said in a phone interview. "I'll take care of the customers who already placed orders, but I don't want to take any more until I know where I will reopen."

Sykes is the sole proprietor of C S Exchange, the only licensed firearm dealer in the city that will transfer guns for individuals. Sykes doesn't sell the guns -- there are no gun stores in D.C. His company facilitates the transfer of guns from out of state stores into the District for a fee of $125 per gun.

Federal law prohibits individuals from buying handguns in one state and transferring them to another state. That can only be facilitated by a licensed firearm dealer. Since the District has no gun stores, transfers are the only means for residents to buy and register their handguns. Rifles and shotguns are exempt from this law.

Lane is now suing the federal government and the state of Virginia, which is where she bought her handguns and where they remain.

In a complaint filed this week in federal court, Lane and a gun rights advocacy group, the Second Amendment Foundation, claim their constitutional rights have been violated.

"These provisions not only have the effect of barring District of Columbia residents from acquiring handguns, but also, generally, unjustifiably frustrate and make more expensive all Americans' attempts to obtain the handguns of their choice," the complaint says.

In Mississippi and elsewhere, poverty plays a huge role. Federal legislation known as the Hyde Amendment forbids the use of federal funding for most abortions. So many women scrounge for the $380 price of a first-trimester abortion. The Jackson Women's Health Organization decreases the fees by up to $75 for the poorest women, but, according to clinic staff, even that is sometimes not enough.

The time women spend trying to scrape together that money can easily push them past the now-crucial 12th week, and into the second trimester, when abortions are both riskier and more expensive.

"Sometimes, they're so close on the edge, by the time they come in and they let the light bill go or whatever, it's too late," says Betty Thompson, who worked as counselor and then director of the Jackson Women's Health Organization for years and is now a consultant to the clinic. Thompson, a stately grandmother who had her first child at 16, always encourages resourcefulness in the women she counsels who are struggling to pay for abortions. "I ask them, 'Have you sold your jewelry yet? Have you asked to borrow from everyone you know?"

The Ninth Amendment is key to understanding how the Founding Fathers thought about the liberties they expected Americans to enjoy under the Constitution. They did not believe that they were creating these liberties in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they were merely acknowledging some of the rights that no government could properly deny.

The history of the Constitution reveals the purpose of the Ninth and the Founders' intent: to protect what constitutional lawyers call unenumerated rights -- those rights the Founder assumed and felt no need to specify in the Bill of Rights. Unenumerated rights include, for example, the right to privacy. In the America of today, unenumerated rights account for freedoms like a woman's right to abortion. ...