The Supreme Court this week ruled that the District of Columbia’s ban on most gun ownership is unconstitutional. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that individuals have a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

Heller, more popularly known as the D.C. gun ban case, was the first Second Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court in nearly 70 years, and the decision marks the first time in history the Court explicitly acknowledged that the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment protects an individual’s fundamental right to gun ownership, rather than just a collective right to serve in state militias.

In February, the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) filed a friend of the court brief in the case. Specifically, CFIF presented two arguments to the Court for recognizing the individual right of the people to keep and bear arms:

1) Contrary to popular myth and gun control advocates' common assertions, the United States Supreme Court has never held that the Second Amendment confers only a collective right to keep and bear arms, nor has it somehow rejected an individual right interpretation.

2) The Supreme Court needed to consider the unexpected and chaotic real-world consequences that would result from a collective states' right ruling. For instance, recognizing some sort of collective right of the states to keep and bear arms would contradict other Constitutional provisions, call the National Guard as it presently exists into question and collide with existing federal firearms laws. Furthermore, such an ill-founded ruling would open the federal courts to a sudden flood of litigation by states against federal firearms laws. These inherent contradictions and flaws in the District of Columbia's proposition clearly demonstrate that the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could not have intended anything other than an individual right of the people to keep and bear arms.

As CFIF’s Timothy Lee stated at the time of our filing, “The Bill of Rights is almost entirely a declaration of individual rights held by 'the people,' and that term is used throughout the Constitution to confer rights upon individual citizens. As our brief points out, one cannot assert with a straight face that these Amendments somehow protect collective, governmental rights, as opposed to individual rights. In fact, the Second Amendment unequivocally states that, '... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'"

The Court’s decision in Heller makes clear what the Founders intended, which is that the Second Amendment is not unique among the other Amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. The fundamental right of the people to keep and bear arms is just that.

As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion, “[W]hatever else [the Second Amendment] leaves to future evaluation, it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”