District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)
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Heller is one of those cases where most gun owners know the outcome but not the details — and the details matter more than people realize. Especially the stuff Scalia explicitly carved out.
Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
People forget this paragraph exists. Heller didn't blow the doors off gun regulation — it established a floor, not a ceiling. Every time someone tells you Heller means the government can't restrict anything, you can point them right here. Scalia himself wrote the exceptions in.
There was a real dispute on our side among the constitutional scholars about whether there was a majority of justices on the Supreme Court who would support the Constitution as written.
The NRA actively tried to kill this case — and LaPierre's quote is basically an admission that they didn't trust the Court they'd spent years lobbying to influence. Levy and Gura ran the whole thing without them, got called out for "sham litigation" by the people who should have been their allies, and still won 5-4. That's a narrow margin on a ruling that now underpins every Second Amendment argument you'll have at the counter of a gun shop for the rest of your life.
What I keep coming back to is that trigger lock requirement — keeping your legally owned firearms unloaded, disassembled, or locked at all times. Imagine explaining to a burglar that your home defense shotgun is currently in three pieces under the bed. Scalia's majority called that out directly as making the right essentially useless for its core purpose, which is the most obvious thing any shooter would tell you after about thirty seconds of thought.
Discussion question: Scalia used "common use" language to suggest that weapons not typically owned by law-abiding citizens could be regulated or banned — and mentioned M-16-style weapons specifically. Given how many AR-platform rifles are sitting in safes across Idaho right now, do you think that "common use" standard actually protects semi-auto rifles going forward, or does it leave a door open that worries you?
Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team
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