Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
Page Number: 41

38 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER 

Opinion of the Court 

militia,” post, at 1 (STEVENS, J., dissenting), it would have
enormous and obvious bearing on the point.  But the Court 
and Story derived the States’ power over the militia from 
the  nonexclusive  nature  of  federal  power,  not  from  the
Second  Amendment,  whose  preamble  merely  “confirms
and  illustrates”  the  importance  of  the  militia.    Even 
clearer was Justice Baldwin.  In the famous fugitive-slave
case of Johnson v. Tompkins, 13 F. Cas. 840, 850, 852 (CC 
Pa.  1833),  Baldwin,  sitting  as  a  circuit  judge,  cited  both 
the  Second  Amendment  and  the  Pennsylvania  analogue
for his conclusion that a citizen has “a right to carry arms
in  defence  of  his  property  or  person,  and  to  use  them,  if 
either  were  assailed  with  such  force,  numbers  or  violence 
as made it necessary for the protection or safety of either.”
Many  early  19th-century  state  cases  indicated  that  the
Second Amendment right to bear arms was an individual 
right  unconnected  to  militia  service,  though  subject  to 
certain restrictions.  A Virginia case in 1824 holding that
the  Constitution  did  not  extend  to  free  blacks  explained
that  “numerous  restrictions  imposed  on  [blacks]  in  our
Statute  Book,  many  of  which  are  inconsistent  with  the
letter and spirit of the Constitution, both of this State and
of  the  United  States  as  respects  the  free  whites,  demon­
strate, that, here, those instruments have not been consid­
ered  to  extend  equally  to  both  classes  of  our  population. 
We will only instance the restriction upon the migration of 
free  blacks  into  this  State,  and  upon  their  right  to  bear 
arms.”  Aldridge  v.  Commonwealth,  2  Va.  Cas.  447,  449 
(Gen. Ct.).  The claim was obviously not that blacks were
prevented  from  carrying  guns  in  the  militia.21    See  also 

—————— 

21 JUSTICE  STEVENS  suggests  that  this  is  not  obvious  because  free 
blacks in Virginia had been required to muster without arms.  See post, 
at  28,  n.  29  (citing  Siegel,  The  Federal  Government’s  Power  to  Enact 
Color-Conscious  Laws,  92  Nw.  U.  L. Rev.  477,  497  (1998)).    But  that 
could  not  have  been  the  type  of  law  referred  to  in  Aldridge,  because 
that  practice  had  stopped  30  years  earlier  when  blacks  were  excluded