Thanks to District of Columbia v. Heller, we now have unanimous agreement that the “collective rights” theory of the Second Amendment is incorrect. All nine Justices agreed that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right; the Justices simply disagreed about the scope of the individual right. Nothing in the dissent claims that there is now, or even has been, a scintilla of evidence from the Founding Era, or from Supreme Court precedent, in support of the “collective right.”
Justice Stevens’ dissent complained that the majority in Heller was upsetting the reliance interest of hundreds of judges, as well as legislators and members of the public regarding what Stevens claimed to be the settled interpretation of the Second Amendment. However, many of the lower court judges and other persons who rejected the Standard Model of the Second Amendment did so by adopting the “collective right” theory. Because the Heller majority and dissent agreed that there was no reasonable basis for the “collective right” theory, I suggest that the reliance interests of “collective rights” believers deserved no consideration by the Supreme Court. In contrast, if one believes Justice Stevens’ claim that the Supreme Court had always (until Heller) used the “narrow” individual right theory (the right is only individuals in state militias), then Justice Stevens would have at least raised a plausible issue regarding the reliance interests of “narrow” individual rights believers.
I would like to create a consolidated list of all judicial decisions which adopted the “collective rights” theory. It would be nice to supplement the list with statements from legislators, journalists, academics, etc., claiming that “collective rights” is the only valid meaning of the Second Amendment. So I encourage commenters to supply as many citations as they would like. It would be ideal if the citations followed conventional Bluebook format, and included a brief parenthetical quote from the source.