James L. Cummins

Case Defines Second Amendment by James L. Cummins

For more than two centuries after the Second Amendment was ratified, its precise legal meaning remained largely unresolved. Courts had generally interpreted it in the context of militia service rather than individual rights, leaving unanswered the question of whether an ordinary citizen, apart from any military obligation, had a constitutional right to keep a firearm. In 2008, the Supreme Court answered that question directly in District of Columbia v. Heller, and the answer reshaped American constitutional law.               

The case arose from a challenge to the District of Columbia's strict handgun ban, one of the most restrictive firearms laws in the country at the time. Dick Heller, a special police officer who carried a firearm at work but was prohibited from keeping a handgun at home, sued to have the ban overturned. The legal question at the center of the case was fundamental: did the Second Amendment protect one’s right to possess firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, or was that right tied exclusively to service in a well-regulated militia?               

Writing for a five-justice majority, Justice Antonin Scalia, who hunted extensively in Mississippi, undertook an exhaustive examination of the amendment's text and history. He traced the meaning of its key phrases through eighteenth-century dictionaries, legal treatises, and the writings of the founders themselves. He drew on the English common law tradition, including the right recognized in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and on the colonial American experience of widespread private arms ownership. His conclusion was unambiguous. The Second Amendment codified a pre-existing individual right to keep and bear arms that was not dependent on militia membership.               

The Court struck down the District of Columbia's handgun ban as unconstitutional but was careful to note that the right it recognized was not unlimited. The opinion explicitly stated that longstanding prohibitions on firearm possession by felons and the mentally ill, laws restricting firearms in sensitive locations, and conditions on commercial sale remained constitutionally permissible. The ruling established an individual right while leaving room for reasonable regulation.               

Two years later, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Court extended the Heller ruling to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment, ensuring that the individual right recognized in 2008 applied nationwide and not merely within federal jurisdictions.               Together, Heller and McDonald settled the foundational constitutional question that had hung over the Second Amendment since ratification. The right to keep arms for self-defense in the home is an individual constitutional right. What remains, and what courts continue to work through, is the question of how far that right extends and what regulations it can bear.

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