Dick Heller Case Summary

The original case had six plaintiffs but the plaintiff that carried the case to the U.S. Supreme Court was Dick Heller. Heller was a special police officer in the District of Columbia. Heller was authorized to carry a firearm on duty, but not at home. Heller's neighborhood was experiencing a rise in crime and Heller naturally wanted to keep a handgun for protection at his home. Unfortunately, for Mr. Heller, the District of Columbia banned the possession of handguns. The D.C. law made it illegal to carry an unregistered firearm and barred the registration of handguns, which effectively creating a prohibition on pistols. The Chief of Police was endowed with the power to issue licenses with a one-year term, but any legal firearms had to kept

The pre-existing nature of the right stems from the Blackstone English Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution only codifies the common law right to make the statement that it shall not be infringed.
The other part of the Second Amendment is the prefatory clause "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state..." (Convention, 1788). The phrase a "Well-regulated Militia" is defined by stare decisis through the case of United States v. Miller to means to be "... comprised of all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. (United States v. Miller, 1939)" The militia is the pool of able-bodied men in which Congress is granted the power to raise an army from and regulate as pre-Article 1, Section 8, Clause 16 would dictate (Convention,

In a militia, the people would bring with them whatever arms that they had available in their civilian life. “The time frame the court must address is always the present" the founding fathers when framing the Constitution wished to preserve the pre-existing right to keep and bear arms; they wished to preserve the right of the people to act as a militia and so there were certainly no plan for a technical obsolescence (Oral Arguments for District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008). The militia being made of the people and understanding that people would bring with them whatever arms they had, the new test would be strict scrutiny based on whatever arms are of common use at the time. Understanding that there are literally millions of handguns owned in the United States a handgun would certainly qualify as being of the common use of the