Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf
Page Number: 20

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

Opinion of the Court 

the  costs  and  benefits  of  firearms  restrictions”  under 
means-end scrutiny).  We declined to engage in means-end 
scrutiny because “[t]he very enumeration of the right takes 
out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of 
Government—the  power  to  decide  on  a  case-by-case  basis
whether  the  right  is  really  worth  insisting  upon.”    Heller, 
554  U. S.,  at  634.    We  then  concluded:  “A  constitutional 
guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments of its use-
fulness is no constitutional guarantee at all.”  Ibid. 

Not only did Heller decline to engage in means-end scru-
tiny generally, but it also specifically ruled out the interme-
diate-scrutiny test that respondents and the United States 
now  urge  us  to  adopt.  Dissenting  in  Heller,  JUSTICE 
BREYER’s proposed standard—“ask[ing] whether [a] statute
burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is 
out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other 
important  governmental  interests,”  id.,  at  689–690  (dis-
senting opinion)—simply expressed a classic formulation of 
intermediate scrutiny in a slightly different way, see Clark 
v. Jeter, 486 U. S. 456, 461 (1988) (asking whether the chal-
lenged law is “substantially related to an important govern-
ment objective”).  In fact, JUSTICE BREYER all but admitted 
that his Heller dissent advocated for intermediate scrutiny 
by  repeatedly  invoking  a  quintessential  intermediate- 
scrutiny precedent.  See Heller, 554 U. S., at 690, 696, 704– 
705  (citing  Turner  Broadcasting  System,  Inc.  v.  FCC,  520 
U. S. 180 (1997)).  Thus, when Heller expressly rejected that 
dissent’s “interest-balancing inquiry,” 554 U. S., at 634 (in-
ternal quotation marks omitted), it necessarily rejected in-
termediate scrutiny.5 

—————— 

5 The dissent asserts that we misread Heller to eschew means-end scru-
tiny because Heller mentioned that the District of Columbia’s handgun 
ban “would fail constitutional muster” “[u]nder any of the standards of
scrutiny that we have applied to enumerated constitutional rights.”  Hel-
ler, 554 U. S., at 628–629; see post, at 23 (opinion of BREYER, J.).  But 
Heller’s passing observation that the District’s ban would fail under any