“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.”
WHETHER THE SECOND AMENDMENT SECURES AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT
The Second Amendment secures a right of individuals generally, not a right of States or a right restricted to persons serving in militias.
August 24, 2004
MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/secondamendment2.htm
Excerpt:
The proposed Constitution that emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 did not have a bill of rights, notwithstanding a late effort by Mason, joined by Elbridge Gerry, to have one drawn up "with the aid of the State declarations." (249) It did contain a careful compromise regarding the militia. The federal Government received, in Article I, Section 8, the powers to call out the militia "to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections, and repel Invasions," to provide for "organizing, arming, and disciplining" it, and to govern any part of it in the service of the federal Government (during which the President would be its commander-in-chief); States expressly retained the authority to appoint officers and to train the militia. (250)
Proposed bills of rights emerged from the ratifying conventions of several of the States. Many of these included protection for the right to arms - usually in language borrowed or adapted from the individual right to arms in the States' declarations of rights, and in any event always in language indicating an individual right. In those proposals, several States for the first time in a single constitutional provision both set out an individual right to arms and praised the citizen militia, uniting language from the different state declarations discussed above. In addition, some Anti-Federalists, concerned about the Constitution's allocation of powers over the militia, sought to protect the ability of the States to maintain effective militias. They proposed to do so expressly, in amendments using language similar to that of Article I, Section 8, and to be placed in the body of the Constitution, not in a bill of rights. (251)
Yet it was the former proposals that laid the foundation for the Second Amendment. And the latter proposals failed in the Federalist-controlled First Congress, which was, as many recognized at the time, willing to protect individual rights but not to alter the balance of power struck by the new Constitution between the States and the nascent federal Government. Thus, the evidence points to an understanding of the Amendment as securing the individual right to arms already well established in America, rather than safeguarding the ability of States to establish well-regulated militias, whether through a "collective right" of States or a quasi-collective right of militiamen. Rather than "lay down any novel principles of government," the Second Amendment embodied the individual "guarant[ee] and immunit[y]" to which Americans were accustomed. (252)
Excerpt to the conclusion
The text of the Amendment's operative clause, setting out a "right of the people to keep and bear Arms," is clear and is reinforced by the Constitution's structure. The Amendment's prefatory clause, properly understood, is fully consistent with this interpretation. The broader history of the Anglo-American right of individuals to have and use arms, from England's Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification of the Second Amendment a hundred years later, leads to the same conclusion. Finally, the first hundred years of interpretations of the Amendment, and especially the commentaries and case law in the pre-Civil War period closest to the Amendment's ratification, confirm what the text and history of the Second Amendment require.
Steven G. Bradbury
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Howard C. Nielson, Jr.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General
C. Kevin Marshall
Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General