What did the Supreme Court say in District of Columbia v. Heller?
About this video
This video explains why District of Columbia v. Heller was a landmark case: for the first time, the Supreme Court said the Second Amendment guarantees individuals a right to have firearms in the home for self-defense, unrelated to militia service. It describes how Richard Heller challenged DC's strict handgun regulation, and how the narrow ruling left many questions open about who counts as 'the people,' what 'bear' means, and what counts as 'arms.'
You'll be able to
- explain what the Supreme Court decided in District of Columbia v. Heller.
- describe why the Heller holding is called narrow.
- identify questions about 'people,' 'bear' and 'arms' that Heller left open.
Key words
- Second Amendment
- The part of the Bill of Rights protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
- militia
- A group of citizens organized for military service, mentioned in the Second Amendment.
- holding
- The legal rule a court actually decides in a case.
- self-defense
- Protecting yourself from harm, which Heller recognized as a purpose for having a gun at home.
- operable firearm
- A gun that is in working condition and can actually be used.
Transcript
District of Columbia v. Heller was a huge case because it was the first time that the Supreme Court of the United States said the the Second Amendment guarantees individuals a right to have firearms in the home for personal purposes totally unrelated to the maintenance of a well regulated militia. What had happened was the District of Columbia in the 1970s was experiencing an uptick in crime and homicide many times tracked to handguns. What D.C. did was enacted a fairly stringent regulation of firearms that made it all but impossible for individuals to have a functioning handgun in the home for the purpose of self-defense. And there was an individual, a man named Richard Heller, who thought that this was a constitutional problem.
He ended up aligning himself with some gun rights advocates. They brought a lawsuit challenging the regulation as a violation of the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court of the United States ended up agreeing with Richard Heller that the Second Amendment wasn't just about a militia, that it actually had content that you could enforce as a private party unrelated to militia service. The Second Amendment decision in Heller was fairly narrow. It just had to do with the ability of an individual like Dick Heller to have a operable firearm in the home for the purpose of self-defense. But, it really didn't go beyond that even though it raised all kinds of other questions, that is, when the Second Amendment uses the word people, does that include all
natural persons, even felons? Does it include minor children? It raised questions like what exactly does the term bear mean here? Can you take a firearm outside of your home for purposes of self-defense? And it raised questions about what exactly is the scope of arms?There is language in the Heller opinion where it simply says arms are weapons, but weapons in the 21st Century are categorically different than weapons that existed in the 1700s. We have shoulder fired missiles, we have explosives, even firearms themselves are much more lethal and conceable than they ever were in 1791. And so all of these questions were left open after the Heller decision.
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