District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, unconnected to service in a militia. The decision struck down the District of Columbia's ban on handgun possession in the home.

For nearly seventy years, the Supreme Court's most extensive discussion of the Second Amendment had been United States v. Miller in 1939, an ambiguous opinion that left the scope of the right uncertain. District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in June 2008, settled the central interpretive question. The District of Columbia had banned the possession of handguns and required any lawfully owned firearm in the home to be kept unloaded and either disassembled or trigger-locked. Dick Heller, a special police officer in the District, sued for the right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense. The Court ruled 5-4 in his favor. Justice Scalia's majority opinion conducted an extensive historical analysis and concluded that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home. The prefatory clause about a well-regulated militia, the Court held, announced the purpose of the right but did not limit it to militia members. The decision did not invalidate all gun regulation. Scalia explicitly noted that the right was not unlimited and that longstanding prohibitions on possession by felons and the mentally ill, restrictions on carrying in sensitive places, and conditions on the commercial sale of arms remained permissible. McDonald v. Chicago in 2010 applied the right against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The framework Heller established governs current Second Amendment jurisprudence, though the precise meaning of "the nation's historical tradition" has been the subject of intense litigation since the Bruen decision in 2022.