Essay On The Second Amendment

The rule for this issue has to do with the 2nd Amendment that states “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Since the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, that required there to be a background check for gun purchases from any professional dealers, the debate on gun control changed greatly. This would be partially due to the steps of the Supreme Court when it changed from its past stance on the 2nd Amendment with it’s verdicts in two major cases, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010). For a long time, the federal judiciary held the opinion that the 2nd Amendment remained among the few provisions of the Bill of Rights that did not fall under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment which would thereby apply its limitations to state …show more content…
Heller, which invalidated a federal law barring nearly all civilians from possessing guns in the District of Columbia, the Supreme Court extended Second Amendment protection to individuals in federal (non-state) enclaves. Writing the majority decision in that case, Justice Antonin Scalia lent the Court’s weight to the idea that the Second Amendment protects the right of individual private gun ownership for self-defense purposes (1). Only two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court struck down a similar citywide handgun ban, ruling that the Second Amendment applies to the states as well as to the federal government. In the majority ruling in that case, Justice Samuel Alito wrote: “Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day, and in Heller, we held that individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.” (2) The Supreme Court’s narrow rulings in the Heller and McDonald cases left open many key issues in the gun control

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Essay On Second Amendment