Yet even now, far too few understand or appreciate the fact that though gun possession is as old as America, so too are gun laws. Researchers and authors including Saul Cornell, Alexander DeConde, Craig Whitney, and Adam Winkler have all published important work making clear that gun laws are by no means a contemporary phenomenon. In recent years, new and important research and writing has chipped away at old myths to present a more accurate and pertinent sense of our gun past. This development, when added to the desire to know our own history better, underscores the value of the study of gun laws in America. In so ruling, the Court brought to the fore and attached legal import to the history of gun laws. Further, the Court referred repeatedly to gun laws that had existed earlier in American history as a justification for allowing similar contemporary laws, even though the court, by its own admission, did not undertake its own “exhaustive historical analysis” of past laws. Yet in establishing this right, the Court also made clear that the right was by no means unlimited, and that it was subject to an array of legal restrictions, including: “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or 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.” The Court also said that certain types of especially powerful weapons might be subject to regulation, along with allowing laws regarding the safe storage of firearms. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that average citizens have a constitutional right to possess handguns for personal self-protection in the home. In its important and controversial 2008 decision on the meaning of the Second Amendment, District of Columbia v.
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