Scalia restored right to bear arms

From USA Today:

Having shaped the theory itself, Scalia then employed it in one of the most important cases of our lifetime: the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, which restored a previously lost clause of the Constitution: the Second Amendment. Since the 1960s, gun control advocates — who were rarely originalists themselves — had been contending that the right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment solely protected what they called a “collective right” of states to have a militia. And most lower federal courts of appeals then adopted this view when considering newly-enacted gun control measures. Then, starting in the 1980s, originalist scholars began pushing back with evidence that, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the amendment protected the fundamental right of individuals to own, possess, carry and use firearms, subject to the reasonable regulation thereof.

When the District of Columbia’s ban on the private possession of handguns was declared unconstitutional by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — one of the few circuits that had not adopted the collective rights reading of the Amendment in the 60s and 70s — the issue of the Second Amendment’s meaning came squarely before the Supreme Court.
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In a sweeping and masterful opinion, Scalia systematically presented and analyzed the evidence that established — to my mind conclusively — that the “right to keep and bear arms” was an individual right that merited the same protection as the First Amendment’s freedoms of speech, press and assembly. It was not enough that the District of Columbia claimed its complete ban on handguns was “reasonable.” As with other fundamental constitutional rights, he concluded, that claim must be judicially scrutinized. And the district handgun ban failed that scrutiny.

Yep, Scalia re-enforced the idea of the individual right to bear arms.