McDonald v. Chicago and the Right to Bear Arms

The Bill of Rights was written to restrain the federal government. For most of the nation's history, the Second Amendment did not stop a city from banning handguns, because it had never been applied to cities or states at all. That changed through a two-step process. First, in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense, but that case involved Washington D.C., a federal enclave, so it did not yet reach state or local laws. Second, in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court faced a Chicago ordinance that effectively banned handguns within the city. The Court ruled that the right recognized in Heller is fundamental enough to count as due process liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment, so it binds states and cities too.

The mechanism is selective incorporation: the Court takes one clause of the Bill of Rights at a time and asks whether it is fundamental to liberty, then uses the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause as the pipeline to apply it against the states. McDonald slots into this same pattern used for freedom of speech, the exclusionary rule, and the right to counsel. Each case picks a right, argues it is essential, and incorporates it, case by case rather than all at once.

Incorporation does not mean regulation disappears. Courts still uphold background checks, restrictions on certain weapons, and limits on who can carry where, just as incorporated speech rights still allow laws against true threats. The right travels to the states, but it travels with room for reasonable limits.