On September 10, 2026, Senior Judge Deborah K. Chasanow of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland granted a preliminary injunction in Silver Spring Jewish Center, Inc. v. Montgomery County, Maryland, No. DKC 26-2963, barring the county from enforcing its ban against an Orthodox synagogue and its rabbi who wish to bring firearms into their own house of worship. The ruling did not rest on one theory. Judge Chasanow found the plaintiffs likely to succeed under both the Second Amendment and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment — two independent constitutional grounds arriving at the same result. That the win came out of the Fourth Circuit is what makes it worth a second look.
Winning Inside the Worst Circuit in the Country
I have said for a long time that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which covers Maryland and Virginia, is among the most hostile venues in the federal system to Second Amendment claims. When that court upheld Maryland’s assault-weapons ban en banc in Bianchi v. Brown, 111 F.4th 438 (4th Cir. 2024), the majority described the rifle’s wounds in language better suited to a trauma ward than a constitutional opinion. That is the appellate ceiling this case sits under, and it is precisely why a district court ruling of this clarity, out of that circuit, carries more weight than the same result would out of the Fifth or the Eleventh. Rabbi J. Menashe Shapiro and the Silver Spring Jewish Center’s volunteer security team — organized after October 7, staffed largely by former servicemembers, licensed under Maryland law to carry — won a preliminary injunction against long odds of geography, not merely against the county’s lawyers.
The Second Amendment Ground: History That Isn’t There
Judge Chasanow applied the plain-text-then-history framework the Supreme Court set out in Bruen and reaffirmed this term in Wolford v. Lopez, 146 S. Ct. 2032 (2026). The inquiry asks whether a law restricts “the people,” “Arms,” and the “keep[ing]” or “bear[ing]” of them. Once Montgomery County’s ban on firearms in places of worship cleared that threshold, the burden shifted to the county to produce a historical tradition of disarming worshipers. It could not. The county leaned on late-nineteenth-century, post-Reconstruction-era statutes — laws too recent to the founding, too geographically scattered, and, as Judge Chasanow found, already rejected as historical analogues by other courts. The relevant benchmark is 1791, the year the Second Amendment was ratified and the year that fixes the scope of the pre-existing right it codified. Judge Chasanow held that the county had not carried its burden, and that its restriction on firearms inside a place of worship is likely unconstitutional as applied to these plaintiffs.
The Free Exercise Ground: A Fraternal Lodge Gets What a Synagogue Doesn’t
The First Amendment holding is, if anything, the sharper of the two. Montgomery County’s ordinance does not disarm every gathering place. It leaves private property owners — the opinion’s example, drawn from Antonyuk v. Chiumento, 89 F.4th 271 (2d Cir. 2023), is a fraternal lodge — free to decide for themselves whether to admit firearms on the premises. A house of worship gets no such choice. Judge Chasanow reasoned that a fraternal lodge and a congregation are functionally alike: both are generally open to the public, both sometimes restrict access to members, both hold regular gatherings. The only distinction is that one meets for religious reasons and the other does not, and the Free Exercise Clause forbids the government from burdening the religious version of an activity while leaving the secular version untouched. Montgomery County’s own lawyers argued that the ordinance regulates only “the instrumentality Plaintiffs wish to use for self-defense” — that the congregants remain free to defend themselves, just not with a firearm. That is a distinction without a difference, and the court did not accept it.
A Duty the Congregation Could Not Delegate
What elevated this case above an ordinary sensitive-places dispute was the plaintiffs’ halachic argument. Citing Jewish legal sources, the complaint asserted that observant Jews carry an obligation to provide for their own communal security personally, rather than by hiring it out to others. Judge Chasanow credited that showing: the ban left the synagogue’s volunteer security team unable to carry, and Rabbi Shapiro unable even to walk to his own synagogue armed, forcing the congregation either to violate a religious commandment or hire outside protection to discharge a duty its own members were obligated to perform themselves. A law that forces that choice on a congregation is not neutral toward religion. It burdens it directly.
What the Ruling Does Not Do
A ruling this significant deserves an accurate account of its limits. Judge Chasanow denied the plaintiffs’ separate challenge to the county’s 100-yard buffer zone around places of public assembly, finding that the facial challenge as pleaded could not show the provision invalid in every application. She did not reach the Establishment Clause or Equal Protection claims, since the Second Amendment and Free Exercise findings already justified relief. The injunction runs to these plaintiffs, not to every congregation in the county. None of that diminishes what was decided. A federal judge, inside the Fourth Circuit, just told Montgomery County that it cannot disarm a synagogue’s own security team on any theory the county offered, and told it so twice.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.