ection to individuals in non-federal cases. The due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment have been used to extend almost all of the protection of the Bill of Rights to the states. However, the Second Amendment has never been incorporated into the broader coverage of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The second principle offered by the court, and later affirmed in the 1939 decision U.S. v. Miller, is that gun ownership may be regulated even at the federal level. The Second Amendment specifies the right to bear arms for the purpose of maintaining a militia. Since the United States already has a standing army, the court reasoned, individual gun ownership is not constitutionally protected.
These court interpretations appear to be at odds with the original intentions of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson was the principal architect of the Second Amendment. He was an avid hunter and gun collector; more important, he realized the political dangers of government restrictions on the ability of ordinary citizens to defend themselves. Jefferson once wrote a strong denunciation of any laws that forbid citizens to "bear," "carry" or "wear arms" (Halbrook, 1986, p. 153).
Nevertheless, the courts have set a different stage for the gun control debate. The courts apparently will not invoke the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitutio
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