District of Columbia v. Heller
Does the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protect an individual's right to keep and bear firearms for private purposes — such as self-defense in the home — or does it only protect a right connected to service in a state-organized militia?
The Decision
5-4 decision · Opinion by Antonin Scalia · 2008
Majority Opinion— Antonin Scaliaconcurring ↓dissent ↓
In a landmark 5–4 decision authored by Justice Antonin Scalia and issued on June 26, 2008, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, particularly self-defense within the home. The Court struck down D.C.'s handgun ban and its requirement that firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional as unconstitutional violations of the Second Amendment. This was the first time the Supreme Court had squarely held that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right unconnected to militia service.
The majority opinion conducted an exhaustive textual and historical analysis of the Second Amendment. Justice Scalia examined the amendment's two clauses separately. He concluded that the prefatory clause — 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State' — announces one purpose of the amendment but does not limit the operative clause that follows. The operative clause — 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed' — codifies a pre-existing individual right. The majority found that 'the right of the people' is a term used consistently throughout the Bill of Rights to refer to individual rights, and that 'keep and bear Arms' encompasses both possessing weapons and carrying them, not solely in a military context. The Court surveyed founding-era sources including state constitutions, legal commentaries by scholars such as William Blackstone and St. George Tucker, and post-ratification interpretations to conclude that the Second Amendment was broadly understood to protect an individual right.
The majority also addressed United States v. Miller (1939), the most relevant prior Supreme Court precedent, and concluded that Miller did not establish a collective-rights interpretation. Rather, the Court read Miller as holding only that the Second Amendment does not protect weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes — a type-of-weapon limitation — rather than restricting the right to militia members.
Critically, however, the majority emphasized that the individual right recognized in Heller is not unlimited. Justice Scalia wrote that 'nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.' The Court described these as examples of 'presumptively lawful regulatory measures.' The opinion declined to establish a specific standard of judicial review (such as strict scrutiny or intermediate scrutiny) for evaluating firearms regulations, leaving that question for future cases. Nonetheless, the Court held that D.C.'s handgun ban failed under any standard of scrutiny because it amounted to a complete prohibition on an entire class of arms that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense.
Concurring Opinions
There were no separate concurring opinions filed in this case. All five justices in the majority — Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito — joined the majority opinion in full without writing separately.
Dissenting Opinions
John Paul Stevensjoined by David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer
Justice Stevens argued that the Second Amendment protects only a right to bear arms in connection with service in a well-regulated militia, and that the majority's recognition of a broad individual right was unsupported by the amendment's text, history, and the Court's own precedent in United States v. Miller. He contended that the majority fundamentally misread the relationship between the amendment's prefatory and operative clauses.
- The prefatory clause is not merely decorative — it announces the amendment's purpose and limits the scope of the operative clause to militia-related activity, meaning the right to bear arms was understood by the Framers as protecting state militias from federal disarmament, not individual self-defense.
- The phrase 'keep and bear Arms' had a distinctly military meaning at the time of ratification, and the historical evidence from state ratifying conventions and early legal commentary supports a militia-centered interpretation.
- The majority's reading renders the prefatory clause meaningless, which violates a basic principle of constitutional interpretation that every word in a provision should be given effect.
- United States v. Miller (1939) was correctly understood by lower courts for decades as endorsing a collective-rights or militia-related interpretation, and the majority's reinterpretation of that precedent was strained and unconvincing.
Stephen Breyerjoined by John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice Breyer argued that even assuming the Second Amendment protects some form of individual right, the D.C. handgun ban and trigger-lock requirement should survive constitutional review because they represent a reasonable legislative response to the serious problem of urban gun violence. He advocated for an interest-balancing approach rather than the rigid categorical approach taken by the majority.
- The proper approach to Second Amendment cases should weigh the government's compelling interest in protecting public safety — particularly in a dense urban setting with severe gun violence — against the burden a regulation places on the right, and D.C.'s laws easily pass such a test.
- The majority's opinion, while claiming not to adopt a standard of review, effectively applies an absolutist approach that makes it nearly impossible to justify any significant firearms regulation, even one tailored to a unique public-safety crisis.
- The colonial and founding-era history actually shows extensive government regulation of firearms — including storage requirements, bans on firing in certain areas, and loyalty-oath conditions on gun ownership — undermining the majority's suggestion that broad firearms regulations are historically anomalous.
- By striking down the trigger-lock requirement, the majority goes further than even an individual-rights view demands, since the provision allowed exceptions and was designed to prevent accidental shootings and theft, representing a minimal burden on self-defense.
Background & Facts
In the mid-2000s, the District of Columbia had some of the most restrictive firearms laws in the United States. A 1976 D.C. law generally prohibited residents from possessing handguns. While residents could register long guns such as rifles and shotguns, those firearms were required to be kept unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times in the home, making them essentially unusable for immediate self-defense. It was, for practical purposes, nearly impossible for an ordinary D.C. resident to legally possess a functional firearm in their own home.
Dick Heller was a special police officer authorized to carry a handgun while on duty guarding the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. However, when he applied for a registration certificate to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense, the District denied his application under its handgun ban. Heller was one of six original plaintiffs who challenged D.C.'s firearms regulations as violating the Second Amendment. The other five plaintiffs were eventually dismissed from the case for lacking legal standing — the ability to show they had suffered a concrete, personal injury — because they had not actually applied for and been denied a firearm registration. Only Heller, who had applied and been rejected, remained.
The case was first heard by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which dismissed Heller's complaint. The lower court relied on existing precedent that interpreted the Second Amendment as protecting only a collective right tied to militia service, not an individual right to own guns. Heller appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which reversed the lower court's decision in a 2-1 ruling. The D.C. Circuit held that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to possess firearms and that D.C.'s handgun ban and trigger-lock requirement were unconstitutional.
The District of Columbia then petitioned the Supreme Court to review the D.C. Circuit's decision. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, making it the first time in nearly seventy years — since United States v. Miller in 1939 — that the Court would directly address the meaning of the Second Amendment. The case attracted enormous public attention and dozens of amicus curiae ("friend of the court") briefs from organizations, scholars, and government officials on both sides of the gun rights debate.
The Arguments
The District of Columbia argued that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms in connection with service in a state-organized militia, not an individual right to own firearms for personal use. It contended that D.C.'s handgun ban and safe-storage requirements were reasonable exercises of the government's power to regulate public safety and fell well within constitutional bounds.
- The prefatory clause of the Second Amendment — 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State' — defines and limits the scope of the entire amendment, tying the right to bear arms exclusively to organized militia service.
- Historical practice and longstanding precedent, including the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, supported the view that the Second Amendment does not guarantee individuals a right to possess firearms unconnected to militia duty.
- Even if some individual right existed, the District's regulations were reasonable public-safety measures designed to address the severe problem of handgun violence in an urban environment, and should survive constitutional scrutiny.
- Numerous federal and state courts had for decades interpreted the Second Amendment as a collective right, and overturning that consensus would call into question a wide range of existing firearms regulations across the country.
Dick Heller argued that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, including self-defense in the home, and that D.C.'s near-total ban on handgun possession and its requirement that long guns be kept nonfunctional violated this fundamental constitutional right.
- The text of the Second Amendment — 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed' — uses the phrase 'the right of the people,' which in every other instance in the Constitution (such as the First and Fourth Amendments) refers to individual rights, not collective ones.
- The historical record from the founding era, including state constitutions, commentary by the Framers, and legal scholarship from the 18th and 19th centuries, overwhelmingly supported the understanding that the right to bear arms was an individual right predating the Constitution.
- D.C.'s total ban on handgun possession and its requirement that other firearms be kept nonfunctional at home made it impossible for law-abiding citizens to use any firearm for the core lawful purpose of self-defense, amounting to an effective destruction of the right.
Cited In
United States v. Hemani
2025 Term · 24-1234
Heller first recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, and its dicta noting that certain 'presumptively lawful' regulations — including prohibitions on possession by felons and the mentally ill — inform the debate over whether similar categorical bans on drug users are constitutional.
Wolford v. Lopez
2025 Term · 24-1046
Cited for its recognition of an individual right to bear arms and its Part 3 discussion of historically rooted exceptions to that right, including sensitive places like schools and government buildings.