District of Columbia v. Heller (No. 07-222):Justice KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court: Firearms have played an important part in the history of the United States. The minutemen of the Revolutionary era helped win our independence. The pioneers of the 19th century helped the nation reach from coast to coast. In the 20th century, however, privately possessed firearms increasingly had destructive effects, whether in the hands of the gangsters of the Prohibition era or the urban street gangs of later decades. Gun violence, we are told, claims approximately 30,000 lives in the United States each year.

We must decide in this case whether the Second Amendment prevents Washington, D.C., from enacting a law that virtually bans the private possession of handguns within the nation’s capital, even within a private home. The Court of Appeals concluded that the law unreasonably interfered with an individual right to possess firearms. For reasons discussed below, we conclude that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to possess firearms, but a remand is necessary to give the District a further opportunity to demonstrate countervailing interests to support enactment and enforcement of the law.

Neither the history nor the text of the amendment provides a clear answer to the question of its meaning. The prefatory clause — “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” — denotes the original meaning of the amendment as a collective right of the states to organize their self-defense. Yet the operational clause protects “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” — the italicized phrase the same as in the Fourth Amendment language to safeguard individual protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Our most recent precedent, U.S. v. Miller (1939), is also less than clear. We understand why most courts, and our dissenting colleagues, have read it as authority for the collective-rights reading of the amendment. Given the limited discussion of the issue and the passage of time, we think it appropriate to revisit the issue.

In the present case, we have benefited from the historical material provided by the parties and various amici. The Court similarly studied historical material on the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment when we were considering the constitutionality of racial segregation in pubic schools, but ultimately found that history inconclusive. We find the history of the Second Amendment similarly inconclusive as to its meaning in 21st century America.

When the Bill of Rights was written, the United States was a largely agrarian society with no organized police services; defense of self, family and home were an individual’s responsibility. Even in cities, and all the more so in the countryside, violent crimes were not a part of daily life.

Sadly, violent crime is today very much a part of daily life. And criminals have at their disposal weapons more lethal and less cumbersome than the muskets, rifles and single-shot pistols of the Revolutionary era. Americans, however, do not confront this threat on their own. Today, modern police forces — well trained, organized and equipped — provide the principal protection of individual security.

We cannot say, however, that individual self-defense is obsolete, nor outside the current scope of the Second Amendment whatever its original meaning may have been. As the Court of Appeals noted, the First Amendment provides protections to means of communications unknown to the Framers; the Fourth Amendment limits searches by technological means unimaginable in the 18th century. The Second Amendment today is best read, as Professor Laurence Tribe has written, as “assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification.”

The District respectfully urges “strong justification” for its law: The vast majority of homicides in this urban jurisdiction are committed with firearms. Handguns are frequently stolen in home burglaries and end up in the hands of criminals. Police consider it dangerous to go into a home where a gun may be stored.

We learn from other submissions that guns are used in slightly more than half of suicides in the United States and that injuries and deaths frequently result from accidental use of guns. Many victims are young people. We are also told that the easy availability of guns often transforms a domestic argument inside a home into a crime of violence with serious or even deadly consequences. And we see from the submissions on both sides that the incidence, benefits, and risks of defensive gun use are subjects of intense dispute.

These considerations suggest that the District may be able to show in a full trial (instead of in a summary judgment proceeding) that it has a compelling interest in the safety and security of its citizens sufficient to uphold reasonable regulation of private possession of firearms, even within the private home.

The individual right protected by the Second Amendment lacks either the historical pedigree or the central role in personal autonomy of other constitutional rights. For that reason, firearms regulations are subject not to heightened constitutional scrutiny, but to the deferential rational-basis review applicable to the vast majority of legislative enactments.

The case is remanded for further proceedings.

Kenneth Jost is the Supreme Court editor for CQ Press.