The Second Amendment occupies a curious place in American legal history. It has been sitting right there in the Bill of Rights since those amendments were first added to the Constitution in 1791. Yet it was not until the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller that the U.S. Supreme Court got around to recognizing what many legal scholars had been saying all along: Namely, that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not a collective right, nor a state's right.
Two years after Heller, in 2010's McDonald v. Chicago, the Court additionally held that the individual right to keep and bear arms that applied against the federal enclave of D.C. also applied against state and local governments.
