In a great victory for the National Rifle Association (NRA), the United States Supreme Court has ruled yesterday in the long awaited case of Mcdonald vs. City of Chicago, that the right to keep and bear arms in the 2nd Amendment right of the U.S. Constitution applies equally to states and cities as well as to individuals. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court likewise decided in favor of the NRA by ruling in Heller vs. Washington D.C. that the right t keep and bear arms is an individual right. Both cases challenged the long standing 30 year ban on guns in the cities of Washington D.C. and Chicago.

To most laymen, the U.S. 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms seems simplistically easy enough to understand. However, the difficulty is in the interpretation of the Constitutional provision. Thus, certain cities such as Washington D.C. and Chicago, as well as Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Philadelphia, to name a few, do not follow the Constitution and have their own self-styled interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Hence, there was a need for the gun owners to resort to the Supreme Court, to press for their rights and invoke the 2nd Amendment.

The Heller and Mcdonald rulings are critical rulings in favor of the right to keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment. These two Supreme Court rulings will form the basis for further legal action at the lower court level to strike down as unconstitutional all city and state wide laws and regulations that ban the ownership, purchase, and carrying of guns.

For further reading go here: 

http://www.nraila.org/News/Read/NewsReleases.aspx?ID=13958

http://www.nraila.org/News/Read/NewsReleases.aspx?ID=13956

Full court decision here: http://www.nraila.org/media/PDFs/litigation/08-1521.pdf