Writing for the Court, Justice Antonin Scalia held that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to keep and bear arms and that DC’s regulation prohibiting the ownership and restricting the storage of handguns violated that right. Scalia began by examining the text of the Second Amendment, which is broken into two parts:

• Prefatory Clause: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, . . .”

• Operative Clause: “. . . the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Scalia reasoned that the language of the Amendment’s operative clause clearly indicates that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not a collective one. Scalia explains that this exact language is also found in the First Amendment’s Assembly and Petition Clause and the Fourth Amendment’s Search and Seizure Clause, so the Founders clearly intended for the Second Amendment to apply in the same manner. Scalia further reasoned that the operative clause applies to “weapons that were not specifically designed for military use and were not employed in a military capacity…” Scalia explains that just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communication and not just those available to the Founders, the Second Amendment’s protections also extend to “all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of founding.”

Scalia held that the prefatory clause of the amendment refers to a citizen militia of able-bodied men freely organized for the security of the state. Scalia dismisses the petitioner’s argument that the language of the prefatory clause denotes that the Founders meant for the Second Amendment to apply only in the context of the military, showing that the Constitution allows for Congress to raise armies, provide a navy, and call forth the militia. Scalia interprets this to mean that the militia mentioned by the Amendment was already in existence before it was ratified, not one that needs to be organized by Congress. The purpose of this clause is to declare the purpose of the Amendment, not to limit its scope. This means that the right to keep and bear arms is not limited to the context of serving in a militia, but rather is protected an individual right. He wrote, “It was understood across the political spectrum that the right helped secure the ideal of a citizen militia, which might be necessary to oppose an oppressive military force if the constitutional order broke down.”

In effect, Scalia found that DC’s handgun ban and storage requirements amounted to a prohibition of an entire class of arms that have a long and popular place in our culture and nation’s history. Scalia demonstrated this, citing the right of citizens to bear arms found in the English Bill of Rights and nine state constitutions ratified in the 18th and early 19th centuries. With this, however, Scalia acknowledges that there is also a history of limiting this right. While Scalia found that no part of DC’s law withstands strict scrutiny, he explained that “limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons.” Ultimately, Scalia ruled that the right to self-defense is inherent in the Second Amendment and that “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.”