District of Columbia v. Heller

What the court held

Dick Heller, a D.C. special police officer, was denied a certificate to register a handgun he wanted to keep at home and sued to block the District's ban on registering handguns, its licensing requirement as applied to carrying a firearm in the home, and its rule that lawfully owned firearms be kept unloaded and disassembled or trigger-locked. Taking up whether a prohibition on possessing usable handguns in the home violates the Second Amendment, the Court read the Amendment's operative clause as codifying a "right of the people" that is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans, with the prefatory militia clause announcing a purpose rather than limiting that right, and held the Amendment extends "prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding." The Court's later opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago describes the result: in Heller "we held that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense, and we struck down a District of Columbia law that banned the possession of handguns in the home."

Summarized from the court's opinion.

What this case is about

Whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense

GunMapUSA summary of the issue, not a quotation from the court.

Key Dates

• 2008-06-26 — Decided

Sources

• CourtListener — retrieved 2026-08-09