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McDonald is plank two of putting a floor under the Second Amendment; Heller v. Washington, D.C. was the first.

If you do not typically follow these sorts of things, Brian Doherty’s excellent article in Reason will get you up to speed.

I’m adding a post category for McDonald, since I expect it will be receiving almost as much attention as Heller did.

The Chicago laws at issue are as significant a violation of a citizen’s right to bear arms as were D.C.’s. Chicago residents can’t have a gun without registration, can’t register handguns, can’t register a gun that’s already in their possession, and if they miss a yearly deadline to re-register, that weapon becomes forever unregisterable. Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation (with the Illinois State Rifle Association) have pulled together a set of plaintiffs with personal tales of having their quality of life lessened by the gun ban.
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[A]s Gura has demonstrated at length in his McDonald filings—as have numerous gun-rights scholars, particularly Stephen Halbrook—the top concerns of the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment in 1868 were the ways the rights of African-American citizens were being violated with impunity in the post-Civil War South, often with the eager cooperation of local and state officials.

Among the fundamental rights noted by the amendment’s boosters was the right to bear arms. The 14th Amendment’s Senate sponsor, Jacob Howard, referred to the need to protect “‘the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as freedom of speech and of the press;…the right to keep and bear arms….’ Howard averred: ‘The great object of the first section of this amendment is, therefore, to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees.’”

This is a crucial observation, and I’ll be watching the press closely to see how well they understand that gun control is historically racist.

he 14th Amendment contains two phrases that could be used to protect individual rights against state and local government encroachment. The one that seems most clearly designed to do so is what Sen. Howard referred to above as “the first section,” the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which says “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
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And as Damon Root has written for Reason, “the 14th Amendment was specifically designed and ratified to protect a sweepingly libertarian idea of self-ownership. That idea includes the right to acquire property, run a business, and buy and sell labor without unnecessary or improper interference by the government.”

That’s exactly why so many jurists of all persuasions have been hesitant about reviving it as an active part of contemporary jurisprudence, although nearly all legal scholars agree that the Slaughterhouse interpretation of the clause was dead wrong.

All excellent. Go read.

And again: this isn’t about what the government allows we, the people, to do. You have the right to keep and bear arms no matter what the government says. This is about what we, the people, allow the government to do, and whether or not our current government understands that.