District Of Columbia V. Heller Case Study

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The Second Amendment; should it go Unquestioned and Unlimited? The Second Amendment, while it seems to be a regularly controversial issue, has not risen to levels of such dispute until recent years (Katsh 2013, p. 339). Until arriving at the 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the last time that the Supreme Court heard a Second Amendment case was 1939, with United States v. Miller (Katsh, 2013, p. 339). Evidently, these cases are brought to the highest level of judicial interpretation in the United States far less than many may believe. Hotly contested is the idea that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution either allows all guns to all citizens, does not allow all guns to all citizens, or some compromise between the two. Exclusive rigidity …show more content…

The question being asked in the aforementioned District of Columbia v. Heller case was as follows: “Whether the following provisions – D.C. Code §§ 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 – violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?”, providing for the idea that the Constitution possibly does consider the militia and personal possession suggestions of the Second Amendment to be in tangent. The 5-4 decision of the Court ultimately made their decision not on the grounds that firearms are permitted because there is no need for a militia, but that the militia clause and the latter clause of the amendment are independent. To clarify, the Court ultimately decided that the preface of the amendment was independent of the latter half; the need for the ability to form a militia was one clause, and the legal ability for citizens to own firearms another. The conflict of the law with the constitution was then found in the city’s ban as a whole, and not because of the

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