The Supreme Court ruled last Thursday in District of Columbia v. Heller that the District of Columbia’s almost de facto ban on handgun ownership violates the Second Amendment. While some liberal commentators have expressed abhorrence toward this ruling, I think it is important to actually discuss what the ruling said. In that vein, we must first look to what Mr. Heller was suing over.

Mr. Heller is a security officer for the federal courts in the District of Columbia. As a part of those duties, he carries a handgun. He applied for a permit to keep the handgun in his home, but was denied. Laws in the District of Columbia provide that: “It is a crime to carry an unregistered firearm, and the registration of handguns is prohibited.” The laws also require that any registered guns be kept in an essentially unusable situation, rendering them useless for self-defense purposes.

The Court was simply ruling that such an absolute prohibition on the ability to defend yourself with a weapon is invalid. Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, went on to say that, “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” He mentioned restrictions on carrying concealed weapons among others:

[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

I find it difficult to believe that so many people can criticize this decision, especially after we truly see how little it does in “advancing” the rights of gun owners. Furthermore, we must consider what is truly at stake here. Mr. Heller was seeking to own a handgun in his own home, in one of the most dangerous cities in the United States (see this table, noting that D.C. has a higher murder rate than most U.S. cities), and in a country where one has no constitutional right to police protection (see Castle Rock v. Gonzales).

We must also recognize that Mr. Heller was seeking to do this legally; it should be painfully obvious that the overwhelming majority of gun violence is not done by individuals with registered weapons (if it is not obvious, see a 1991 survey of prison inmates which showed that 73 percent of “those who had ever possessed a handgun did not purchase it from a gun dealer”).

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