McDonald v. City of Chicago is the 2010 Supreme Court decision that applied the Second Amendment to state and local governments. Decided 5–4 on June 28, 2010, the ruling held that the individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense recognized two years earlier in District of Columbia v. Heller is a fundamental right protected against state and municipal infringement by the Fourteenth Amendment.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v City of Chicago The immediate effect was to invalidate Chicago’s decades-old handgun ban. The lasting effect was to establish that no city or state could prohibit private handgun ownership in the home.
The Chicago Ordinance at the Center of the Case
In 1982, Chicago passed an ordinance that required registration of all firearms and simultaneously refused to accept any new handgun registrations. The practical result was a near-total ban on handgun possession by private citizens. If you didn’t already have a registered handgun before 1982, you could not legally acquire one.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v City of Chicago
Otis McDonald, a retired maintenance engineer living in the Morgan Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, became the lead plaintiff challenging that ordinance. Three other Chicago residents joined him. They argued that Heller‘s recognition of an individual right to self-defense should protect them from local laws the same way it protected residents of Washington, D.C. from federal ones. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument, holding that existing Supreme Court precedent had never applied the Second Amendment to the states. The appeal to the Supreme Court followed.
Why Heller Left the Question Open
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court struck down a Washington, D.C. law banning handgun possession in the home, holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, independent of service in a militia.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. District of Columbia v Heller, 554 US 570 But Washington, D.C. is a federal district. Heller only established that the federal government could not ban handguns. Whether states and municipalities were bound by the same restriction was the question McDonald forced the Court to resolve.
The Incorporation Question
When the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, it only restricted the federal government. States could pass laws that would have violated those protections had Congress enacted them. Chief Justice John Marshall confirmed as much in Barron v. Baltimore, writing that the amendments “contain no expression indicating an intention to apply them to the State governments.”3United States Courts. Now Cherished, Bill of Rights Spent a Century in Obscurity
After the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Supreme Court gradually applied protections from the Bill of Rights to state governments through a process called selective incorporation. By 2010, nearly every major protection had been incorporated: free speech, the right to counsel, protection against unreasonable searches, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Second Amendment was a conspicuous holdout. Whether you could own a handgun depended entirely on where you lived.
The Fourteenth Amendment contains a Privileges or Immunities Clause that would seem the natural textual home for such rights. But in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases, the Court read that clause so narrowly it became almost inert, and later Courts routed incorporation through the Due Process Clause instead.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 US 365Congress.gov. Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases McDonald’s legal team asked the Court to overrule Slaughter-House and revive the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The majority declined and stayed on the well-worn due process path.
What the Majority Held
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Kennedy, with Justice Thomas concurring in the judgment on different grounds. The controlling question was whether the right to keep and bear arms is “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty,” the standard the Court applies to decide whether a Bill of Rights protection reaches the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v City of Chicago
The majority concluded that it is. Alito traced the right to bear arms through English common law, the founding era, ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and post-Civil War history. “It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” he wrote.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v City of Chicago The opinion rejected Chicago’s argument that firearms should receive weaker protection than other incorporated rights, calling that position “at war with our central holding in Heller” and refusing to treat the Second Amendment as “a second-class right.”
What the Ruling Did Not Do
The majority stressed that the Second Amendment right is “not unqualified.” The decision preserved the categories of permissible regulation recognized in Heller, including restrictions on firearms possession by convicted felons and people with serious mental illness, prohibitions on carrying firearms in sensitive places like schools and government buildings, and laws against straw purchases.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v City of Chicago The ruling struck down blanket bans on handgun ownership. It left substantial room for regulation short of total prohibition.
Justice Thomas’s Concurrence
Justice Thomas agreed with the result but argued the Court was using the wrong part of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Due Process Clause “speaks only to process,” he wrote, and is a poor fit for protecting a substantive right like firearm ownership.6Legal Information Institute. McDonald v City of Chicago – Justice Thomas Concurring Opinion In his view, the right to keep and bear arms is a “privilege of American citizenship” that should be protected through the Privileges or Immunities Clause. His concurrence remains the most prominent modern argument for reviving that clause, though no majority has adopted the position.
The Dissents
Justice Stevens filed a dissent arguing that private firearm ownership was not a “liberty” interest protected by the Due Process Clause. In his reading, the historical evidence did not compel the majority’s conclusion. The question, he wrote, was not whether self-defense matters but whether the Constitution requires every state and city to protect it through private handgun ownership specifically.
Justice Breyer wrote a separate dissent joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, focused on federalism and practical consequences. Breyer favored an interest-balancing approach that would weigh the government’s public safety justifications against the burden on individual rights. The majority explicitly rejected that framework, viewing it as a route to treating the Second Amendment as less than fully constitutional.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v City of Chicago
What Chicago Did After the Ruling
The decision reversed the Seventh Circuit and sent the case back to the lower courts. Chicago did not simply accept unrestricted handgun ownership. Within days, the city council passed a new ordinance that allowed handgun possession in the home but wrapped it in layers of regulation: a Chicago Firearms Permit on top of the state Firearm Owner’s Identification card, mandatory training with range time and classroom instruction, a limit of one handgun registration per thirty-day period, and a rule that only one operable handgun could be inside the home at a time. Carrying firearms outside the home remained illegal within city limits.
That pattern has played out across the country. Once the option of outright bans was closed off, jurisdictions shifted to regulatory frameworks built on permits, training, and registration. Whether those substitute regulations survive constitutional scrutiny has become the central question in Second Amendment litigation.
How Bruen and Rahimi Built on McDonald
McDonald settled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities. It did not settle how much regulation the amendment permits. For over a decade, lower courts applied various balancing tests, often upholding significant restrictions. In 2022, the Supreme Court changed the framework.
In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court struck down New York’s requirement that concealed-carry applicants show a “special need” for self-protection beyond general self-defense. The 6–3 decision, written by Justice Thomas, extended McDonald‘s logic from the home to public carry, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc v Bruen Bruen also replaced interest-balancing with a new standard. When the Second Amendment’s text covers someone’s conduct, that conduct is presumptively protected, and to justify a regulation the government must show it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”8Supreme Court of the United States. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc v Bruen Opinion
In 2024, the Court refined that standard in United States v. Rahimi, upholding a federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. A modern regulation does not need to be a “dead ringer” or “historical twin” of a founding-era law to be constitutional, the Court held. It needs to be “consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.”9Supreme Court of the United States. United States v Rahimi Opinion Rahimi signaled that the historical test has limits and will not automatically invalidate every modern firearms restriction, though where those limits fall remains actively litigated.
Otis McDonald died in April 2014 at the age of 80, four years after the ruling that bears his name. The doctrinal line from his case runs directly through Bruen and Rahimi. McDonald v. City of Chicago did not resolve the debate over gun regulation, but it permanently changed its terms by making the Second Amendment binding on every level of government in the country.