McDonald v. City of Chicago is the 2010 Supreme Court decision that made the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms enforceable against state and local governments. By a 5–4 vote issued on June 28, 2010, the Court held that the individual right recognized two years earlier in District of Columbia v. Heller is fundamental under the Fourteenth Amendment, so cities and states cannot impose outright bans on handgun ownership any more than the federal government can. The immediate casualty was Chicago’s de facto handgun prohibition. The broader effect was a national floor of Second Amendment protection every jurisdiction has to respect.
Why the Case Was Needed After Heller
In 2008, District of Columbia v. Heller held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess ordinary weapons for lawful purposes, including self-defense in the home, and struck down a D.C. handgun ban. But Washington, D.C. is a federal enclave. The Bill of Rights originally restricted only the federal government, so Heller said nothing about whether a state or city could impose the same kind of ban.
The day after Heller came down, Otis McDonald and several other Chicago residents filed suit challenging their city’s handgun ban, which closely resembled the D.C. law the Court had just invalidated. Their case would answer the question Heller left open.
The Chicago Ordinance at Issue
Chicago required every gun owner to obtain a registration certificate before legally possessing a firearm. At the same time, the city refused to accept registration applications for handguns, a policy in place since 1982. The result was a complete ban in everything but name: you could not legally own a handgun because the city would not register one. Residents who had previously registered handguns lost that right if their registration ever lapsed, because the ordinance barred re-registration once a certificate expired. The village of Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, maintained a similar prohibition.
Otis McDonald, a retired maintenance engineer who had lived in the Morgan Park neighborhood since 1971, wanted a handgun for home defense. He owned shotguns for hunting but considered them impractical for a nighttime break-in. He and three other individual plaintiffs, along with the Illinois State Rifle Association, brought the federal lawsuit.
The Legal Question: Incorporation
Heller had already settled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. The question in McDonald was whether that right applies against state and local governments through a doctrine called incorporation.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause forbids any state from depriving a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Supreme Court has used it to apply most Bill of Rights protections to the states on a case-by-case basis. If a right is both fundamental to ordered liberty and deeply rooted in American history and tradition, the Court incorporates it. By 2010, nearly every major protection in the Bill of Rights had been incorporated this way, from free speech to the right against unreasonable searches. The Second Amendment was a conspicuous holdout.
The petitioners’ legal team, led by attorney Alan Gura, initially pressed a bolder theory: that the right should be protected through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause instead of the Due Process Clause. That clause had been effectively gutted by the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873, which held that it protected only a narrow set of rights tied to national citizenship. Reviving it would have been a dramatic shift in constitutional law. The National Rifle Association, which intervened through separate counsel, argued for the more conventional due process route.
The 5–4 Decision
The Supreme Court reversed the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and held that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Second Amendment right fully applicable to the states. Justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas formed the majority. Justices Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor dissented.
Chicago’s handgun ban, and Oak Park’s alongside it, could no longer stand. No state or local government anywhere in the country could impose a blanket prohibition on handgun ownership for self-defense.
Justice Alito’s Majority Opinion
Justice Alito, writing for the majority, applied the standard incorporation test and concluded that the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to the nation’s scheme of ordered liberty and deeply rooted in American history and tradition. He traced the importance of the right through the post-Civil War era, noting that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment considered firearm ownership a basic element of citizenship and personal security, particularly for newly freed Black Americans facing violence and disarmament in the South.
The majority used the Due Process Clause as the vehicle for incorporation, declining to revisit Slaughter-House. Alito acknowledged the Privileges or Immunities argument but found it unnecessary to overturn longstanding precedent when due process incorporation achieved the same result. He also repeated Heller’s caveats: the right is not unlimited. Restrictions on possession by felons and the mentally ill, bans on firearms in sensitive places like schools and government buildings, and prohibitions on straw purchases all remained presumptively valid.
Justice Thomas’s Concurrence
Justice Thomas agreed with the outcome but wrote separately to argue that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was the correct constitutional basis. He would have overruled the Slaughter-House Cases and held that the clause automatically applied the protections of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments. In Thomas’s view, the Due Process Clause was an awkward fit for protecting substantive rights because it speaks to process, not to the content of the rights themselves. No other justice joined his concurrence.
The Dissents
Two justices wrote separate dissents.
Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens argued that the Second Amendment is fundamentally a federalism provision, designed to preserve the autonomy of state governments rather than guarantee an individual right enforceable against those same governments. He pointed out that firearms have an ambivalent relationship to liberty: they can protect homeowners, but they also enable violence. In his view, the ability to own a particular type of firearm was different in kind from the liberty interests traditionally protected under the Due Process Clause. He also noted that states have a long, unbroken history of regulating firearms and that the democratic process had proven capable of protecting gun owners’ interests without judicial intervention.
Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, focused on practical consequences. He argued that nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale warranted calling the right to keep arms for private self-defense “fundamental” in the constitutional sense. He warned that incorporation would transfer regulatory authority over firearms from democratically elected legislatures to courts, a shift he considered dangerous given the complexity of gun policy. He also criticized the majority’s reliance on historical analysis, noting that the four Heller dissenters had read the same history and reached the opposite conclusion.
What the Ruling Did Not Do
McDonald established that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities. It did not spell out how courts should evaluate specific gun laws. The opinion repeated Heller’s assurances that longstanding regulations remain valid, including bans on possession by felons and the mentally ill, prohibitions in sensitive places, and bans on straw purchases. Beyond that, the Court left lower courts to work out the details, which produced years of inconsistent rulings as different circuits applied different levels of scrutiny.
The decision also did not prevent cities from passing new regulations short of an outright ban. Within days of the ruling, Chicago enacted a replacement ordinance that prohibited gun sales within city limits and restricted where registered gun owners could carry their weapons. The constitutional fight shifted from whether the Second Amendment applied to states at all to which specific regulations could survive review.
From McDonald to Bruen
The uncertainty about the proper legal standard persisted for over a decade until New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022. That case extended the right recognized in Heller and McDonald beyond the home, holding that ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a right to carry handguns publicly for self-defense. Bruen also established a clear test: when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, that conduct is presumptively protected, and the government can justify a regulation only by showing it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
Bruen rejected the means-end scrutiny tests lower courts had been using since McDonald, where judges balanced the government’s interest in public safety against the burden on gun rights. Under the new framework, the question is whether a challenged law has a historical analogue in the regulatory tradition around the time of the founding or the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. McDonald made incorporation the law of the land. Bruen dictated how courts must apply it.