Attention DHS dual credit students - we will walk through these cases, and the laws they challenge, at some point in class as a way to see how the interpretation of the Constitution can change over time.
This list is hardly comprehensive, but its intended to help students get an idea about how the court has interpreted and reinterpreted Second Amendment rights - as well as issues indirectly related to them - over history. I pulled these from various sources, but the Wikipedia page on firearms case law is especially useful.
- Click here for it.
Here are brief summaries:
- United States v. Cruikshank. (1875) This case was primarily about the applicability of the Bill of Rights to the states. See: the Colfax Massacre and the Enforcement Act of 1870. Prior to the 14th Amendment, it only limited the national government. The text of the amendment suggested that the now citizens of the national government are protected from the actions of their state governments as well. The Supreme Court disagreed. It could not protect the nationally defined Second Amendment rights of African-Americans from actions of the states or private citizens. If they wanted to restrict constitutionally defined rights, they could.
- Presser v. Illinois (1886) The Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law limiting the ability of individuals to form their own militias, and to parade and drill with arms did not violate the national Second Amendment. They considered the Second Amendment to be an individual right. This allowed for the limitation for individual militias.
- United States v Miller. (1939) This was a constitutional challenge to the National Firearms Act of 1934. The law required the registration of certain types of guns, as well as the payment of a tax. This was implemented by the IRS. The court ruled that the law was constitutional for a variety of reasons, most importantly because the guns affected were not used in militias and were not protected by the Second Amendment. Only military type weapons were protected.
- DC v Heller. (2006) This challenged the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 and placed limits on the ability of residents to own and posses handguns - among other weapons - in their homes. Guns in the homes also had to be disassembled - or otherwise unusable. A five person majority ruled that this violated an implicit right to self defense, and that guns not traditionally used in militias could fall under Second Amendment protection. The dissent argued - among other things - that it was reasonable for local government to want to limit the availability of guns as a way of preventing crime.
- McDonald v. Chicago (2010) The Heller case only applied to the national government since DC is under the jurisdiction of Congress. McDonald was a challenge to a similar ordinance and by virtue of the same argument - that there was and implicit right to self defense in the Second Amendment, and it applied to the state and local government through the 14th Amendment.
