District of Columbia v. Heller
The Supreme Court struck down Washington DC's handgun ban and its trigger-lock requirement, ruling for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep a firearm at home for self-defense — wholly apart from any connection to militia service.
The decision reshaped American constitutional law: the right to keep and bear arms now belongs to individuals, not just organized militias, though the Court preserved many existing gun regulations and left lower courts to define their limits.
“The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government — even the Third Branch of Government — the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”
The majority's rejection of Justice Breyer's interest-balancing approach to the Second Amendment.
Why this is a landmark case
District of Columbia v. Heller was the first decision to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms—one not tied to service in a militia. Striking down the District of Columbia's near-total ban on handguns, the 5-4 majority, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, concluded after an extensive historical analysis that the Amendment protects the right of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, most notably self-defense in the home.
The decision resolved a long-running debate over whether the Second Amendment protected only a collective, militia-related right, and it reframed gun rights as an individual constitutional liberty.
Heller's significance has only grown. McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) applied the individual right to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) extended it beyond the home and adopted a demanding 'history and tradition' test for evaluating gun regulations—later refined in United States v. Rahimi (2024). Heller is the foundation of all modern Second Amendment litigation and one of the most consequential originalist decisions in the Court's history.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Dick Heller was a special police officer in Washington DC, authorized to carry a handgun while on duty at a federal courthouse. He applied to register a handgun he wanted to keep at home for self-defense, but the District refused. DC law banned handgun possession entirely and required any lawful firearm — such as a registered long gun — to be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times, rendering it immediately unusable for self-defense.
The question before the Court
Did Washington DC's complete ban on keeping handguns at home, and its requirement that all lawful firearms be kept inoperable, violate the Second Amendment's protection of an individual right to keep and bear arms?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense at home, independent of service in a militia. The Court read the Amendment's operative clause — "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" — as an individual right belonging to all Americans, using the text's ordinary meaning, founding-era history, and state constitutional analogues to confirm this understanding. Prior precedents, including United States v. Miller, did not foreclose this conclusion.
DC's handgun ban violates this right because it prohibits an entire class of arms that Americans overwhelmingly prefer for home self-defense. The trigger-lock requirement also violates the Amendment because it makes all lawful firearms in the home permanently inoperable, destroying their core self-defense utility. DC must allow Heller to register his handgun and carry it within his home.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the Second Amendment's operative clause — 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.' Every other constitutional use of 'the people' refers to an individual right, not a collective one requiring membership in an organized body. This gave the Court a strong presumption that the Second Amendment belongs to all Americans individually.
- The Court analyzed 'keep and bear Arms' word by word. 'Keep' simply means to possess; 'bear' means to carry for a purpose, including confrontation or self-defense — not exclusively for military service. Founding-era dictionaries, state constitutions, and legal sources all used both phrases in non-military contexts, contradicting the dissent's view that 'bear arms' carried only a military meaning.
- The prefatory clause — 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State' — announces a purpose for the right but does not limit the operative clause. History showed that tyrants eliminated militias precisely by disarming the people; protecting individual arms ownership was the mechanism for preserving the militia, not a limit on the right itself.
- The Court reviewed the right's deep historical roots: England's 1689 Bill of Rights secured an individual right to arms for self-preservation; American colonists invoked that right in response to British disarmament; and founding-era state constitutions, post-ratification commentary, and 19th-century courts all consistently treated the right as individual and self-defense-oriented.
- Prior Supreme Court decisions did not foreclose this reading. Miller (1939) held only that short-barreled shotguns lacked a sufficient connection to a well-regulated militia — it said nothing about whether the underlying right was individual or collective, and it did not require that the bearer be a militia member. Cruikshank and Presser similarly left the individual-rights interpretation open.
- DC's handgun ban is a complete prohibition on the class of arms Americans most overwhelmingly choose for home self-defense, making it invalid under any standard of scrutiny applied to enumerated constitutional rights. The trigger-lock requirement, which makes every firearm in the home permanently inoperable, independently violates the Amendment by eliminating the core use — immediate self-defense — that the right protects.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits United States v. Miller (307 U. S. 174)
Miller held only that certain weapon types fall outside Second Amendment protection — not that the right is limited to militia service.
Distinguishes United States v. Cruikshank (92 U. S. 542)
Cruikshank's discussion of the Second Amendment supports the individual-rights view and says nothing limiting the right to militia service.
Distinguishes Presser v. Illinois (116 U. S. 252)
Presser addressed only private paramilitary organizations and said nothing about the Second Amendment's scope beyond that context.