Does the Second Amendment Protect the Right to Bear Arms?
The Second Amendment reads as follows: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.Now that the United States is protected by a trained, volunteer military force rather than a civilian militia, is the Second Amendment still valid? Does the Second Amendment exclusively provide for arms to supply a civilian militia, or does it guarantee a separate universal right to bear arms?Current Status The U.S. Supreme Court has never struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. The two cases generally cited as most relevant to the Second Amendment are: • U.S. v. Cruikshank (1875), in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an 1870 federal law punishing individuals for violating the civil rights of others, using the Fourteenth Amendment to justify federal intervention in law enforcement (which was generally left to the states). The test case was the 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which over 1
