After Heller: The New American Debate About Guns

More than five years after six Washington, D.C. residents challenged the city’s 32-year-old ban on all functional firearms in the home, on June 26, 2008 the Supreme Court held in District of Columbia v. Heller that the ban is unconstitutional. While the majority in Heller found that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own weapons for self-defense, and not merely a right for those involved with a “well-regulated militia,” the decision raises as many questions as it answers.

While Heller rules out straightforward gun bans, it does not rule out the regulation of the ownership of firearms. Can we expect increasingly heated fights over the legal scope of regulation? Will the clear legal affirmation of an individual right to bear arms sap gun rights defenders of one of their chief rhetorical strategies: the regulatory slippery slope to the prohibition of gun ownership? How does a decision concerning Second Amendment rights in the federal district apply to gun laws in the states and their cities? Does Heller change everything? Or does it merely mean that the residents of the District of Columbia can acquire a gun if he or she can manage to clear all the inevitable regulatory hurdles?

To tell us what Heller really portends for the future of gun rights in America, Cato Unbound has assembled a stellar panel Second Amendment experts. Leading off we have Cato’s own Robert A. Levy, a chief architect of the Supreme Court case and co-counsel to Mr. Heller. Commenting on Levy’s lead essay, we’ll have Denis Henigan, legal director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; David Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute and a noted Second Amerndment scholar and activist; and Erwin Chemerinsky, the Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Duke University, one of America’s most accomplished Constitutional scholars and lawyers.

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