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52  NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSN., INC. v. BRUEN 

Opinion of the Court 

4 
Evidence  from  around  the  adoption  of  the  Fourteenth
Amendment also fails to support respondents’ position.  For 
the  most  part,  respondents  and  the  United  States  ignore 
the “outpouring of discussion of the [right to keep and bear 
arms]  in  Congress  and  in  public  discourse,  as  people  de-
bated whether and how to secure constitutional rights for
newly free slaves” after the Civil War.  Heller, 554 U. S., at 
614.  Of course, we are not obliged to sift the historical ma-
terials for evidence to sustain New York’s statute.  That is 
respondents’ burden.  Nevertheless, we think a short review 
of the public discourse surrounding Reconstruction is useful 
in  demonstrating  how  public  carry  for  self-defense  re-
mained a central component of the protection that the Four-
teenth Amendment secured for all citizens. 

A short prologue is in order.  Even before the Civil War 
commenced in 1861, this Court indirectly affirmed the im-
portance of the right to keep and bear arms in public.  Writ-
ing  for  the  Court  in  Dred  Scott  v.  Sandford,  19  How.  393 
(1857), Chief Justice Taney offered what he thought was a 
parade of horribles that would result from recognizing that 
free  blacks  were  citizens  of  the  United  States.    If  blacks 
were citizens, Taney fretted, they would be entitled to the 
privileges  and  immunities  of  citizens,  including  the  right 
“to  keep  and  carry  arms  wherever  they  went.”  Id.,  at  417 
(emphasis added).  Thus, even Chief Justice Taney recog-
nized (albeit unenthusiastically in the case of blacks) that 
public carry was a component of the right to keep and bear
arms—a right free blacks were often denied in antebellum 
America. 

After the Civil War, of course, the exercise of this funda-
mental right by freed slaves was systematically thwarted.
This  Court  has  already  recounted  some  of  the  Southern 
abuses violating blacks’ right to keep and bear arms.  See 
McDonald, 561 U. S., at 771 (noting the “systematic efforts”