See his smile? He's standing outside the United States Supreme Court. Today that Court agreed with him that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees his individual right to keep and bear arms.
Dick Heller is a security guard. He carries a handgun at work, protecting government property and people within the District of Columbia. That's perfectly legal. But when Mr. Heller applied for a permit for a handgun at home, the DC government turned him down.
Why is it OK for the same man to carry a gun protecting government property and people, but not OK for him to protect himself and his family at home?
As I've written before, Dick Heller the security guard is working on behalf of a collective will--the government. But the District of Columbia sees Dick Heller the individual, separated from his protective role within the collective, as unqualified and unworthy to possess the same tools he uses at work.
In today's decision, Justice Antonin Scalia writes:
The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a “right of the people.” The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase “right of the people” two other times, in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not “collective” rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some
corporate body.
He goes on in the footnote:
JUSTICE STEVENS is of course correct, post, at 10, that the right to assemble cannot be exercised alone, but it is still an individual right, and not one conditioned upon membership in some defined “assembly,” as he contends the right to bear arms is conditioned upon membership in a defined militia. And JUSTICE STEVENS is dead wrong to think that the right to petition is “primarily collective in nature.”
Today's decision affirms what the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]
That's right -- all men are created equal. Dick Heller is created the equal of any man, with all the natural rights of any man. His natural right to self protection, and the tools thereof, are equal to the rights available to any collective.
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