A broad view of 'militia'
The debate over gun rights — a topic that, like abortion and capital punishment, ignites passions — has long been waged in politics, public opinion and lower courts.
The Supreme Court last considered the reach of the Second Amendment in a 1939 case. It did not rule definitively, but its decision was interpreted by a wide swath of lower-court judges to bar an individual right to guns.
Yet the popular notion of a right to arms persisted, as did gun rights advocates' efforts to change the landscape as more conservative jurists took the federal bench.
Thursday's case was brought by Dick Heller, a security guard who wanted a handgun in his Washington, D.C., home for self-defense. Heller had been turned down by D.C. officials under the city's 1976 ban on handguns in the home.
Breaking with most past lower-court rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last year sided with Heller and definitively declared an individual right to own guns. Judge Laurence Silberman, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote the decision.
In affirming the D.C. Circuit's ruling, the Scalia majority homed in on key words in the two parts of the Second Amendment: the preface that refers to "a well regulated militia" and the clause "the right of the people to keep and bear arms."
One key to his ruling was Scalia's interpretation of a "militia," which traditionally is a unit outside the regular army and that today could be compared with state National Guard units. He said it covered all able-bodied males acting for the common defense.
"The conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment's ratification," Scalia wrote, "was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty." He stressed that people carried arms outside of organized militias. Beyond that, Scalia said, the preface puts no limits on the second clause referring to the right of the people to bear arms.
The dissenting justices complained about Scalia's reasoning and the myriad questions left open by the ruling. Stevens rejected the idea that the Second Amendment's drafters wanted to limit legislative "authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms" or intended to "enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution."