The Reasonable Regulation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Abstract

The Supreme Court has recently held in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That decision, however, is only the beginning of the inquiry. Individual rights, via the police power, are subject to reasonable regulation. The difficult question remaining is whether a particular regulation is unreasonable, unduly infringing on an individual's right to keep and bear arms, and is therefore unconstitutional. This note proposes a workable analytic approach to addressing this question. Guided by the Common Law Constructive Method, this note takes First Amendment time, place, and manner doctrine and transposes it onto the Second Amendment.

Keywords: second amendment, reasonable regulation, reasonableness, the right to keep and bear arms, keep and bear arms, reasonable regulation of second amendment, individual right