has taken the view that “[t]he Second Amendment secures a right of individuals generally, not a right of States or a right restricted to persons serving in militias.” The document is dated Aug. 24, 2004, but it has apparently just been put on the Web site very recently.
The opinion is long and detailed, and I suspect will be quite influential — OLC opinions tend to be. I also hope it gets some media attention: Certainly this sort of reasoned opinion by the Justice Department office charged with opining on such questions ought to be pretty newsworthy.
Here’s the closing paragraph:
For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and to bear arms. Current case law leaves open and unsettled the question of whose right is secured by the Amendment. Although we do not address the scope of the right, our examination of the original meaning of the Amendment provides extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, and no persuasive basis for either the collective-right or quasi-collective-right views. The text of the Amendment’s operative clause, setting out a “right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” is clear and is reinforced by the Constitution’s structure. The Amendment’s prefatory clause, properly understood, is fully consistent with this interpretation. The broader history of the Anglo-American right of individuals to have and use arms, from England’s Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification of the Second Amendment a hundred years later, leads to the same conclusion. Finally, the first hundred years of interpretations of the Amendment, and especially the commentaries and case law in the pre-Civil War period closest to the Amendment’s ratification, confirm what the text and history of the Second Amendment require.
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