District of Columbia v. Heller

For two hundred years, almost all judges in America agreed that the Second Amendment was intended, as the Framers stated in its text, to protect the “well-regulated militia” that the Framers saw as “necessary to a free state” and nothing more.

But on June 26, 2008, all of that changed. The Supreme Court of the United States issued a 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held for the first time that “law-abiding, responsible Americans” have the right to possess guns in the home – even if they have nothing to do with armies or militias – and they need not possess guns for “the security of a free state,” but are entitled to do so in the home for self-defense.

Specifically, District of Columbia v. Heller decided that there was an individual right to a firearm to defend “hearth and home.” While this did upend two centuries of precedent, the Supreme Court’s new interpretation of the Second Amendment still considered many gun laws as constitutional.

The Heller decision was a watershed moment in Second Amendment jurisprudence – and a controversial one. Scholars and jurists, including conservatives, lambasted the Court’s decision as the ultimate in judicial activism. Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, referred to the Heller decision as “faux originalism” and a “snow job” that “is questionable in both method and result.” The debate over the real world effect of Heller was not less heated. After all, the scope of the Second Amendment is an academic issue: it may determine what laws Americans are permitted to enact and enforce to stop the epidemic of gun violence that claims over 40,000 lives every year.

Today, debates over the Heller decision continue, but two facts are undisputed. One, Heller is the law of the land. Two, Heller does not prevent common sense gun laws from being passed in legislatures and upheld in courts across the country.