Scalia and the 2nd Amendment

Second-Amendment--270x156Right to gun ownership is individual, not collective.

Justice Scalia wrote the Court’s decision on District of Columbia v. Heller on Jun 26, 2008:

Overturning DC’s handgun ban, the court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to own a gun for private use–not only in connection with service in a militia. The 5-to-4 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, left unanswered questions, but also much room for continued gun regulation, short of an absolute ban.

HELD: Delivered by Scalia; joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable the citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms.

One thought on “Scalia and the 2nd Amendment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s