McDonald v. City of Chicago

Supreme Court of the United States
561 U.S. 742, 130 S.Ct. 3020, 177 L.Ed.2d 894 (2010)

ELI5:

Rule of Law:

The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense is a fundamental right that is fully applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Facts:

Otis McDonald, a resident of Chicago in his late seventies, lived in a high-crime neighborhood.
As a community activist involved in alternative policing strategies, McDonald's efforts to improve his neighborhood subjected him to violent threats from drug dealers.
Another Chicago resident, Colleen Lawson, had her home targeted by burglars on multiple occasions.
The City of Chicago enacted an ordinance that effectively banned the possession of handguns by almost all private citizens.
The Village of Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, enacted a similar ordinance making it unlawful for any person to possess a handgun.
McDonald, Lawson, and other petitioners owned handguns for personal protection but were required by the ordinances to store them outside the city limits.
The petitioners wished to keep their handguns in their homes for self-defense but were prohibited from doing so by the local ordinances.

Procedural Posture:

Otis McDonald and other residents sued the City of Chicago in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, a federal trial court.
Petitioners sought a declaration that Chicago's handgun ban violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
The District Court dismissed the lawsuit, reasoning it was bound by existing circuit precedent and Supreme Court cases holding that the Second Amendment did not apply to the states.
The petitioners, as appellants, appealed the dismissal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, an intermediate federal appellate court.
The Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court's dismissal, acknowledging that older Supreme Court precedents were 'defunct' but stating it was obligated to follow them.
The petitioners sought, and the U.S. Supreme Court granted, a writ of certiorari to review the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

Premium Content

Subscribe to Lexplug to view the complete brief

You're viewing a preview with Rule of Law, Facts, and Procedural Posture

Issue:

Does the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self-defense apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment?

Opinions:

Majority - Justice Alito

Yes, the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States. The Court holds that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self-defense as recognized in District of Columbia v. Heller. The Court's inquiry is whether the right is 'fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty' or 'deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.' Citing Heller, the opinion affirms that self-defense is the 'central component' of the right. The Court traces the right's history from its English origins through the American founding and, crucially, to the Reconstruction era, concluding that the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment viewed the right to bear arms as a fundamental right necessary to protect newly freed slaves from disarmament and violence. The decision rejects a 'watered-down' version of the right for the states, ensuring it applies with the same force as it does to the federal government.

Concurring - Justice Scalia

Yes, the Second Amendment applies to the states. This concurrence agrees with the majority's straightforward application of settled incorporation doctrine. It is written primarily to rebut Justice Stevens' dissent, criticizing his 'living constitutionalist' approach to substantive due process as subjective, unconstrained, and less democratic than the majority's historically-focused method, which makes the traditions of the American people paramount.

Concurring - Justice Thomas

Yes, but the right to keep and bear arms is applicable to the States through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, not the Due Process Clause. This approach is more faithful to the original text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Privileges or Immunities Clause was meant to protect the fundamental rights of American citizenship, including those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, from state infringement, and the Court's contrary decision in the Slaughter-House Cases was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

Dissenting - Justice Stevens

No, the Second Amendment right should not be incorporated against the states. This case should be analyzed under substantive due process, asking whether the 'liberty' protected by the Fourteenth Amendment includes the right to own a handgun, not as a simple 'incorporation' question. The right to keep and bear arms is fundamentally ambivalent, as firearms facilitate violence as much as they protect from it. States should retain the flexibility to experiment with different gun control regulations to address local public safety concerns. Furthermore, the Second Amendment's original purpose as a 'federalism provision'—protecting state militias from the national government—makes it an especially poor candidate for incorporation against the states.

Dissenting - Justice Breyer

No, the Second Amendment right should not be incorporated. The right to bear arms for private self-defense is not 'fundamental' for incorporation purposes, as the historical evidence is deeply contested and there is no popular consensus. Unlike other incorporated rights, this right does not protect minorities or the politically powerless, and its incorporation would significantly disrupt the states' traditional police powers to protect the health and safety of their citizens. Deciding the reasonableness of gun regulations requires complex, empirical judgments about costs and benefits, a task for which legislatures are far better suited than courts.

Analysis:

This landmark decision fundamentally altered the landscape of Second Amendment law by extending the individual right to bear arms, recognized for federal enclaves in Heller, to all state and local governments. It establishes the right as 'fundamental' within the American constitutional tradition, invalidating absolute handgun bans like Chicago's. However, the Court explicitly did not set a specific level of scrutiny (e.g., strict, intermediate) for judging gun laws, leaving a critical question unanswered and setting the stage for decades of future litigation over the constitutionality of various state and local firearms regulations.

Gunnerbot

AI-powered case assistant

Loaded: McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010)

Try: "What was the holding?" or "Explain the dissent"