In McDonald v. City of Chicago, decided June 28, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms applies to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision doomed Chicago’s decades-old handgun ban and, for the first time, gave gun owners a federal constitutional shield against city and state firearm prohibitions.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
The Chicago Law That Triggered the Case
Chicago required a valid registration certificate for any firearm kept in the city, and possessing an unregistered gun was a criminal offense.2Supreme Court of the United States. Otis McDonald, et al. v. City of Chicago, Illinois, et al. In 1982, Mayor Jane Byrne and the city council closed the registration window for handguns. Anyone who had already registered a handgun could keep it; no one else could register a new one. Because unregistered guns were illegal, the freeze functioned as a near-total handgun ban and stayed in force for nearly thirty years.
Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old retired maintenance engineer whose home and garage had been broken into repeatedly, wanted a handgun by his bed for self-defense. He and several other Chicago residents, along with the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association, sued the city. Their lawyer, Alan Gura, had argued and won the Heller case two years earlier.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
Why Heller Wasn’t Enough
In 2008, District of Columbia v. Heller established that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for lawful purposes such as self-defense in the home, independent of militia service.3Justia. District of Columbia v. Heller The Court struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban on that basis.
But Washington is a federal district, and Heller only bound the federal government. A person living under an identical ban in Chicago got nothing from Heller directly. Nineteenth-century Supreme Court decisions, most notably Presser v. Illinois in 1886, had held that the Second Amendment “is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the National government, and not upon that of the States.”4Library of Congress. Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 Lower courts were bound by that precedent. The district court dismissed the Chicago challenge, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal, acknowledging that only the Supreme Court could change the rule.5Oyez. McDonald v. Chicago
The Real Legal Question: Incorporation
McDonald was less about firearms than about constitutional architecture. The Bill of Rights originally restrained only the federal government. Over the twentieth century, the Supreme Court applied most of its guarantees to the states one by one through a doctrine called incorporation, using the Fourteenth Amendment as the vehicle. By 2010, the Second Amendment was one of the last major rights the Court had not yet incorporated.
The petitioners offered two routes. The primary one was the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the same clause the Court had used to incorporate most other rights, which asks whether a right is “fundamental to the Nation’s scheme of ordered liberty” or “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago The alternative was more ambitious: the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which forbids states from abridging “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” That clause had been narrowly read in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases and effectively dormant ever since.6U.S. Congress. Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases McDonald’s team asked the Court to overrule Slaughter-House and revive it.7Legal Information Institute. McDonald v. Chicago
The 5-4 Ruling
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the plurality opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms enforceable against state and local governments, at least for traditional lawful purposes such as self-defense.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
The majority chose the Due Process Clause as the mechanism. Alito’s opinion drew heavily on the historical record surrounding the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868, pointing to congressional concern in the post-Civil War period about Southern states disarming newly freed Black citizens as evidence that the amendment’s framers meant to protect the right to bear arms against state interference.2Supreme Court of the United States. Otis McDonald, et al. v. City of Chicago, Illinois, et al. The Court declined to disturb the Slaughter-House Cases.
The Court did not itself strike down Chicago’s ordinance. It reversed the Seventh Circuit and sent the case back to be evaluated under the newly incorporated right. Chicago moved to repeal its handgun ban shortly afterward.
Thomas’s Concurrence
Justice Thomas agreed with the outcome but disagreed with the route. He argued that the Privileges or Immunities Clause, not the Due Process Clause, was the textually correct path, writing that he “cannot agree that it is enforceable against the States through a clause that speaks only to ‘process.'”8Supreme Court of the United States. McDonald v. City of Chicago – Thomas Concurrence He called the right to keep and bear arms a “privilege of American citizenship” and said Slaughter-House had been wrongly decided. No other justice joined that portion of his opinion.
The Dissents
Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, urging a narrower approach to incorporation that would have left states more room to regulate firearms. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Stevens, wrote separately to argue that the Second Amendment does not guarantee a fundamental individual right to self-defense and warned that incorporating it would generate extensive litigation over long-accepted gun laws. Breyer said public safety should weigh more heavily than the majority allowed.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
What the Ruling Left in Place
The majority stressed that the right recognized in McDonald is “not unqualified.” Echoing Heller, the opinion listed categories of firearm regulation that remain constitutional: bans on possession by convicted felons and the mentally ill, prohibitions on carrying in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, and laws against straw purchases.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago McDonald forbids outright prohibitions on the kind of firearm ownership Heller protected; it does not eliminate ordinary gun regulation.
What Came Next: Bruen
McDonald resolved incorporation but left lower courts to work out how to evaluate specific firearm laws, and for more than a decade they applied competing tests. In 2022, the Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which extended the right recognized in Heller and McDonald to carrying a handgun for self-defense outside the home. Bruen also replaced the interest-balancing approach many lower courts had used, requiring the government to show that any challenged regulation is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”9Supreme Court of the United States. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen Bruen quoted McDonald’s description of individual self-defense as “the central component” of the Second Amendment right, confirming that the 2010 ruling remains the foundation of modern Second Amendment law.