The NRA’s Favorite Supreme Court Ruling Failed to Gut Gun Control. A Law Professor Explains Why.

Heller, the man, celebrates the landmark gun rights ruling bearing his name. [AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana] The National Rifle Association, and its lawyers, draw a line straight from the founding fathers to the modern “good guy with a gun.” In their framing, people who arm themselves with lethal weapons to defend themselves, their families, and their communities do so with the blessing of the Constitution, as evidenced by the meaning of the Second Amendment. But that understanding of the Second Amendment was enshrined by the courts only recently. Ten years ago, on June 26, 2008, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia delivered his landmark opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller , the case that established a constitutional right to own a gun for self-defense. The 2008 Heller decision left lots of room for gun regulation. For its namesake, that meant the war had just begun. The decision struck down a Washington, D.C., law that banned handgun ownership within the district and required rifles and shotguns be stored disassembled and unloaded, effectively rendering them useless for home defense. In his majority opinion, Scalia held that self-defense was at the core of the Second Amendment, not the right of the people to form well-regulated militias, as courts had previously maintained. Scalia’s pro-gun jurisprudence was amplified when the court threw out a similar handgun ban in the 2010 case McDonald v. City of Chicago . Yet Scalia’s opinion in Heller did not gut other gun laws. In fact, his decision […]

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