Otis McDonald was an African-American man
living in Chicago. He was in his late seventies.
He was a social activist trying to improve the area
where he lived.
And because of that he was threatened by drug dealers
and others who were basically the targets of clean up
that he was hoping to achieve.
McDonald tried to purchase a gun
but because Chicago had a gun ban, he was unable to get one.
So he petitioned that his Second Amendment
constitutional right was being ignored
and the Chicago law was unconstitutional.
I think we tend to forget that the Bill of Rights
was meant to just control the federal government
and really had nothing to do with the states.
So actually at the time that the Bill of Rights were passed,
there were some states like Massachusetts
that had an official religion.
Up right, right through the American Civil War,
the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states,
just the federal government.
And after the Civil War,
because the southerners were ignoring the rights
of these newly freed slaves,
Congress passed an amendment,
the Fourteenth Amendment,
which would allow individuals to bring a case
claiming that their rights were being infringed.
This would mean that the states had to abide
by the individual rights that were expressed
in the Bill of Rights.
The Second Amendment hadn't been incorporated
because it took so long for the Court
to actually decide its basic meaning.
The Heller case had applied only to Washington DC,
which of course was just a district,
and so it wasn't yet incorporated
through the Fourteenth Amendment.
And to incorporate it, you needed to bring a case to test
whether the Second Amendment should be incorporated
and apply throughout the country to all the states
and all the cities.
McDonald's argument was that the Court in Heller
had pointed out and decided
that there was an individual right
to have a weapon in your home for your self-defense
and other lawful purposes.
And so therefore this Chicago law
that deprived residents
of a right to have a weapon to protect themselves
was unconstitutional.
The city of Chicago argued that the Heller decision
did not apply to the city of Chicago
because it was confined to the District of Columbia
and that also it should not be incorporated
because the Second Amendment was not necessarily fundamental
to American history and was certainly not a right
of all civilized countries.
The vote in this case was five to four again.
Justice Alito wrote the opinion in this case.
It was a plurality opinion because Thomas wanted to go back
to using privileges and immunities
to incorporate rights
under the Bill of Rights.
The other four members of the majority
went along with what had become traditional over the years
and that is to use the due process clause to incorporate it.
The four justices in the dissenting opinion
argued that Heller had been wrongly decided.
There was no individual right
and the test for incorporation should not be whether
this is a fundamental right
consistent with America's history and liberty,
but whether it's a fundamental right
for other civilized nations.