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Page Number: 47

44 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER 

Opinion of the Court 

Cong.  Globe,  39th  Cong.,  1st  Sess.,  1182  (1866).    Repre­
sentative Nye thought the Fourteenth Amendment unnec­
essary because “[a]s citizens of the United States [blacks]
have equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms 
for self-defense.”  Id., at 1073 (1866). 

It  was  plainly  the  understanding  in  the  post-Civil  War 

Congress  that  the  Second  Amendment  protected  an  indi­
vidual right to use arms for self-defense. 

4. Post-Civil War Commentators. 
Every late-19th-century legal scholar that we have read 

interpreted  the  Second  Amendment  to  secure  an  individ­
ual  right  unconnected  with  militia  service.  The  most 
famous  was  the  judge  and  professor  Thomas  Cooley,  who
wrote a massively popular 1868 Treatise on Constitutional 
Limitations.  Concerning the Second Amendment it said: 

“Among  the  other  defences  to  personal  liberty
should  be  mentioned  the  right  of  the  people  to  keep
and bear arms. . . . The alternative to a standing army
is  ‘a  well-regulated  militia,’  but  this  cannot  exist 
unless  the  people  are  trained  to  bearing  arms.    How 
far it is in the power of the legislature to regulate this 
right, we shall not undertake to say, as happily there
has been very little occasion to discuss that subject by
the courts.”  Id., at 350. 

That  Cooley  understood  the  right  not  as  connected  to 
militia  service,  but  as  securing  the  militia  by  ensuring  a 
populace  familiar  with  arms,  is  made  even  clearer  in  his
1880 work, General Principles of Constitutional Law.  The 
Second  Amendment,  he  said,  “was  adopted  with  some 
modification  and  enlargement  from  the  English  Bill  of
Rights  of  1688,  where  it  stood  as  a  protest  against  arbi­
trary  action  of  the  overturned  dynasty  in  disarming  the 
people.”  Id.,  at  270.    In  a  section  entitled  “The  Right  in 
General,” he continued: