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Heller effectively ended the long-standing contest between the collective rights and individual rights models of the Second Amendment, with the individual rights model triumphing. The acknowledgment that the Second Amendment creates an individual right of some scope to own firearms soon led to challenges against state and local gun regulations, as well as federal ones. Unsurprisingly (and as discussed in Chapter 5), the same five-justice majority that supported the individual rights model also supported incorporating that right against the states, striking down a Chicago gun ban (similar to the District ban above) two years later in McDonald v. Chicago (2010). McDonald, importantly, made no substantive changes to Heller’s holding, instead applying it to state as well as federal jurisdictions.

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Civil Liberties: Cases and Materials Copyright © 2021 by Rob Robinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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