District of Columbia v. Heller

In 1976 the District of Columbia banned the possession of handguns and required that any rifle or shotgun kept at home be disassembled or fitted with a trigger lock. Dick Heller, a special police officer who carried a gun on duty guarding a federal building, was refused a permit to keep one at home. He and five other residents, recruited by libertarian lawyers, sued. For most of the twentieth century courts had read the Second Amendment as protecting the right to bear arms in connection with service in a state militia.

On June 26, 2008, the Supreme Court struck down the ban five to four. Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion was an extended exercise in originalism. The prefatory clause about a well regulated militia, he wrote, announced a purpose but did not limit the operative clause, which codified a pre-existing individual right to keep and bear arms. The handgun was the quintessential self-defense weapon, and a ban on keeping it in the home failed under any standard of review.

Scalia added that nothing in the opinion cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on possession by felons and the mentally ill, laws forbidding firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or conditions on commercial sale. Justice John Paul Stevens dissented that the amendment was adopted to protect the state militias and nothing more. Justice Stephen Breyer argued that even an individual right should yield to the city's judgment about gun violence.

Two years later McDonald v. Chicago applied the right against the states. In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022 the Court went further, extending the right to carrying a gun in public and requiring that gun laws be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation. Gun-rights advocates call Heller the vindication of the amendment's plain meaning, while gun-control advocates argue it misread history and has tied the hands of legislatures.