Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf
Page Number: 35.0

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

29 

Opinion of the Court 

scope  of  the  protection  applicable  to  the  Federal  Govern-
ment and States is pegged to the public understanding of
the right when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791.  See, 
e.g.,  Crawford  v.  Washington,  541  U. S.  36,  42–50  (2004) 
(Sixth Amendment); Virginia v. Moore, 553 U. S. 164, 168– 
169 (2008) (Fourth Amendment); Nevada Comm’n on Eth-
ics  v.  Carrigan,  564  U. S.  117,  122–125  (2011)  (First 
Amendment).

We also acknowledge that there is an ongoing scholarly 
debate on whether courts should primarily rely on the pre-
vailing understanding of an individual right when the Four-
teenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 when defining its 
scope (as well as the scope of the right against the Federal
Government).  See, e.g., A. Amar, The Bill of Rights: Crea-
tion and Reconstruction xiv, 223, 243 (1998); K. Lash, Re-
Speaking the Bill of Rights: A New Doctrine of Incorpora-
tion (Jan. 15, 2021) (manuscript, at 2), https://papers.ssrn 
.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3766917 (“When the peo-
ple  adopted  the  Fourteenth  Amendment  into  existence,
they readopted the original Bill of Rights, and did so in a
manner  that  invested  those  original  1791  texts  with  new 
1868 meanings”).  We need not address this issue today be-
cause, as we explain below, the public understanding of the
right to keep and bear arms in both 1791 and 1868 was, for 
all relevant purposes, the same with respect to public carry. 

* 

* 

* 

With  these  principles  in  mind,  we  turn  to  respondents’ 
historical  evidence.  Throughout  modern  Anglo-American
history, the right to keep and bear arms in public has tra-
ditionally been subject to well-defined restrictions govern-
ing the intent for which one could carry arms, the manner
of carry, or the exceptional circumstances under which one
could  not  carry  arms.    But  apart  from  a  handful  of  late-
19th-century jurisdictions, the historical record compiled by 
respondents  does  not  demonstrate  a  tradition  of  broadly