Supreme Court Affirms Right to Keep Handguns in Home

A narrowly divided Supreme Court today ruled that the Second Amendment's right to bear arms is applicable to all states and municipalities. The ruling will most likely overturn Chicago's strict ban on handguns.

"It is clear that the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty," wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the five-four majority.

In 2008, the Court issued a landmark decision in the case District of Columbia v. Heller that established for the first time an individual's constitutional right to have a gun in his house, striking down Washington D.C.'s, strict handgun ban. The ruling, however, applied only to federal enclaves.

Today's ruling applies to states and cities, such as Chicago, that have similar bans.

But Alito was also careful to note that in some instances the right to bear arms can be limited.

"It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibited the possession of handguns in the home, recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose," he wrote.

"We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."