Heller Decision

District of Columbia v. Heller is the Supreme Court decision that fundamentally changed American gun law. In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Scalia, the Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a militia — striking down Washington DC's handgun ban.

The Heller case was deliberately orchestrated by libertarian legal strategists over years. Robert Levy, a wealthy Cato Institute senior fellow, recruited plaintiffs and funded the litigation specifically to get a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court after decades of lower court rulings that upheld gun regulations.

The NRA actively tried to stop the case. Before Levy filed in February 2003, the NRA sent two lawyers to dissuade him. When that failed, it filed a competing case — Seegars v. Ashcroft (April 2003) — through attorney Stephen Halbrook and moved to consolidate with Parker without notifying the Parker team. It also lobbied Congress to pass the D.C. Personal Protection Act, which would have repealed DC's handgun ban and mooted the litigation entirely. The NRA's concern was strategic: it feared that a loss before the Supreme Court could do lasting damage to Second Amendment claims. Only after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in November 2007 did the NRA reverse course — filing an amicus brief through the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund and organizing a Congressional amicus signed by Vice President Cheney, 55 Senators, and 250 House members, the most co-signed SCOTUS amicus in history at the time.

// NOTE: The NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund's own website (nradefensefund.org) claims it "supported" Heller as part of its litigation history. This conflicts with the contemporaneous ABA Journal account of the NRA's active opposition and late-stage participation. We cite the ABA Journal account here.

While Scalia's opinion explicitly allowed for many gun regulations (prohibitions on felon possession, mental illness restrictions, commercial sale regulations), subsequent litigation has used Heller to attack virtually every gun law.

• Struck down DC handgun ban
• Established individual Second Amendment right as baseline for all future gun litigation
• Foundation for thousands of post-Heller Second Amendment challenges to gun laws