What is the Second Amendment?

The Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms, declaring that a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Ratified on December 15, 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it grew out of colonial experience with British attempts to disarm the militia at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and out of the broader English tradition recognized in the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which allowed Protestant subjects to have Arms for their Defence.

James Madison drafted the amendment in response to Anti-Federalist concerns voiced by writers such as Patrick Henry, who feared that a standing federal army could oppress the states without an armed citizenry. For nearly two centuries, courts treated the amendment as protecting a collective right tied to militia service, a reading reinforced by United States v. Miller (1939), which upheld the National Firearms Act of 1934 regulating sawed-off shotguns.

That framework changed in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), where Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 5-4 majority, held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm in the home for traditionally lawful purposes such as self-defense, unconnected with militia service. The Court extended Heller to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), again 5-4. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) further held that gun regulations must be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation, and that the Constitution presumptively protects carrying a handgun outside the home for self-defense.

The right is not unlimited. Heller itself preserved longstanding prohibitions on possession of firearms by felons and people with mental illness, laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, and conditions on the commercial sale of arms. United States v. Rahimi (2024) upheld a federal ban on firearm possession by individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders.

Federal statutes including the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, which created the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, remain in force. State laws vary widely on concealed carry, magazine capacity, assault weapon definitions, and red flag procedures. Naturalization candidates should know that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to keep and bear arms, subject to reasonable regulation and to limits on who may possess firearms and where they may be carried.