On 20 November, the Supreme Court accepted for review the Heller case, on the right to own a gun, from the District of Columbia. The lower court, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, had ruled that individual citizens had a Second Amendment right to own guns for self-defense in the District, contrary to the law passed by the D.C. Council.

This is a critical case to bring the 2nd Amendment in from the cold. All other basic rights from the Bill of Rights have long since been declared “fundamental” and applied to the states as well as to the federal government. Now, it is finally time for the Supreme Court to recognize that the right of self defense is the basic reason why they wrote this right into the Bill of Rights. The history of the writing and the ratification of the 2nd Amendment leads inexorably to the conclusion that it is an individual right.