McDonald v. Chicago is the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that applied the Second Amendment to state and local governments. In a 5–4 ruling, the Court held that the individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense, recognized two years earlier in District of Columbia v. Heller, is a right that cities and states must also respect. Before McDonald, Heller only constrained federal jurisdictions like the District of Columbia. After McDonald, every gun law in the country, at every level of government, had to be measured against the Second Amendment.
The Chicago Law at the Center of the Case
Chicago had run a de facto handgun ban since 1982, built out of two ordinances that worked in tandem. Section 8-20-040 of the Municipal Code required every firearm in the city to be registered. Section 8-20-050 then forbade the registration of handguns. You could not legally possess an unregistered gun, and you could not register a handgun, so ordinary residents could not legally keep one at home.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
Narrow exceptions existed for a few categories such as licensed private detective agencies.2Illinois Courts. City of Chicago v. Haworth For everyone else, the ban was total.
Who Otis McDonald Was
Otis McDonald was a 76-year-old retired maintenance engineer living in the Morgan Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. He described his area as troubled by drug trafficking and gang activity, and he had been burglarized five times. He owned shotguns for hunting but wanted a handgun he could keep accessible for defending his home. Chicago’s registration ban made that illegal.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
On June 26, 2008, one day after the Supreme Court decided Heller, McDonald and several other Chicago residents filed suit in federal court challenging the city’s handgun restrictions. A parallel challenge targeted a similar ban in the nearby suburb of Oak Park.3Legal Information Institute. McDonald v. Chicago The timing tracked the opening Heller had created: that decision recognized an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense, but only in a federal enclave.4Supreme Court of the United States. District of Columbia v. Heller McDonald asked the courts to extend that protection to state and local laws.
The Legal Question: Does the Second Amendment Bind States?
The Bill of Rights originally limited only the federal government. Over the twentieth century, the Supreme Court applied most of its protections to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, a process called incorporation. By 2008, nearly every right had been incorporated except the Second.
McDonald’s lawyers offered the Court two ways to close that gap, both under the Fourteenth Amendment.5Supreme Court of the United States. McDonald v. City of Chicago
Privileges or Immunities
The primary argument was that the right to bear arms is a privilege of national citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause.3Legal Information Institute. McDonald v. Chicago Accepting that theory would have required the Court to revisit the Slaughter-House Cases, an 1873 decision that had narrowed the clause to a small set of federally created rights.6Constitution Annotated. Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases
Due Process
The backup argument used the Due Process Clause, which forbids states from depriving anyone of liberty without due process of law. This was the route the Court had used to incorporate almost every other right. Under that framework, a right applies to the states if it is fundamental to the Nation’s scheme of ordered liberty or deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.5Supreme Court of the United States. McDonald v. City of Chicago
What the Supreme Court Decided
The Court ruled 5–4 for McDonald. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the lead opinion. Parts commanded a full five-justice majority; other parts were joined only by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Kennedy, making those sections a plurality.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
The majority declined to revive the Privileges or Immunities Clause. It incorporated the Second Amendment through the Due Process Clause instead. Alito traced the right to keep arms through English common law, colonial America, the founding era, and the post-Civil War period, concluding that self-defense is a basic right deeply embedded in American tradition. That met the standard for incorporation, so state and local governments became bound by the same Second Amendment constraint that Heller had already imposed on the federal government.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
Alito was careful to add that the right is “not unqualified” and that the limitations recognized in Heller remained intact. The ruling did not create an unlimited right to own any weapon in any circumstance. It said the Second Amendment applies whether the gun law comes from Congress or from a city council.
Thomas’s Concurrence
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome but wrote separately to argue that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was the correct legal basis. He treated the Slaughter-House Cases as wrongly decided and criticized substantive due process as a “judicial fiction.” No other justice joined his opinion.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
The Dissents
Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer each dissented. Stevens challenged the majority’s historical analysis, arguing the evidence did not support treating private handgun ownership as so fundamental that no state could regulate it. Breyer focused on practical fallout, warning that the decision would produce years of litigation and force judges into policy questions they were not equipped to answer. Both dissenters would have left gun policy largely to elected officials.1Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
What Governments Can Still Regulate
McDonald did not sweep away gun regulation. Alito reaffirmed language from Heller identifying several categories of laws as presumptively valid: prohibitions on firearm possession by felons and people with serious mental illness, bans on carrying firearms in sensitive places like schools and government buildings, and conditions on the commercial sale of firearms.7Legal Information Institute. Heller and Individual Right to Firearms
The Court did not specify what level of scrutiny courts should apply to gun laws that stop short of a total ban. Lower courts filled that gap on their own, and most adopted a two-step framework that balanced the government’s interest against the burden on gun rights.
Chicago’s Response
The Supreme Court reversed the Seventh Circuit and sent the case back. Chicago did not wait for the remand. Within days, the city repealed its registration ban and passed a replacement.
Anyone keeping a firearm at home now had to obtain a Chicago Firearms Permit, which cost $100 and expired after three years. Applicants had to be at least 21 (or 18 with parental consent), hold a valid Illinois Firearm Owner’s Identification card, complete at least four hours of classroom instruction and one hour of range training, and pass a background check. Each firearm had to be registered separately at $15 per gun, and residents could register no more than one handgun in any 30-day period.8City of Chicago. Municipal Code of Chicago – Weapons Ordinance SO2013-6015 A separate provision limited each permit holder to one assembled and operable firearm inside the home. The ordinance also banned firing ranges within city limits while requiring range training to qualify for the permit, a rule the Seventh Circuit struck down in 2011 in Ezell v. City of Chicago.
How the Standard Changed After McDonald
Breyer’s prediction about litigation proved accurate. In the years after McDonald, federal courts heard hundreds of Second Amendment challenges. Most applied the two-step test, and results diverged across the circuits.
In 2022, the Supreme Court replaced that framework. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Thomas wrote for the majority that when the Second Amendment’s text covers a person’s conduct, the government can only justify a regulation by showing it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”9Justia. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen Courts may no longer weigh policy goals against burdens on gun owners. They must ask whether a modern law has a historical analogue from the founding era or the period when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, comparing both the burden on self-defense and the justification for that burden.
McDonald remains the reason those questions get asked of state and local laws at all. Whatever standard the Court sets for evaluating gun regulations, it applies to city hall as well as to Congress because of what the Court decided in 2010.