He was 34 years old when the D.C. city council took his rights away. Today, as a senior citizen, he got them back. Sort of.

Dick A. Heller, a security guard whose lawsuit resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling favoring gun-ownership rights, was given his handgun registration certificate at D.C. police headquarters this morning. He applied for it last month, a few weeks after the June 26 court ruling, and had been waiting for police to complete a background check.

Why “sort of”? Because, as you’ll recall, his application to register another gun was rejected thanks to D.C.’s bad faith attempt to define as a “machine gun” any weapon that loads from the bottom. So it’s back to court he’s going. Maybe he’ll get to register his semi-automatic before he turns 100.

Here’s video of him from last month talking about the rejected application.