Excerpts From Friend-of-Court Briefs

"This declares a political principle and then guarantees a substantive right. The term 'the people' is in juxtaposition to the government, federal or state. Only individuals have 'rights,' while the United States and the states have 'powers.' "

• Pink Pistols—a group of gay and lesbian firearms owners (.pdf):
"Laws that prevent the use of firearms for self defense in one's own home disproportionately impact those individuals who are targets of hate violence due to their minority status, whether defined by race, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic. Even in their homes, LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered] individuals are at risk of murder, aggravated assault and other forms of hate violence because of their sexual orientation. In fact, the home is the most common site of anti-gay violence."

• Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (.pdf):
"Throughout history, the disarmament of populations has all too frequently resulted in genocide and mass oppression. History is replete with this familiar pattern. To limit the right to keep and bear arms to a state regulated militia is to disregard what the Framers understood—that individual possession of arms is essential to preventing usurpation by the state.

"In many cases, firearm confiscation followed only after the groundwork was laid by purportedly 'reasonable' regulation and registration of firearms. History illustrates just how readily the standardless 'reasonable' regulation of firearms invites large scale abuse by the state and ultimately paves the way for wholesale confiscation of arms and the mass slaughter of the disarmed (much like the massive censorship that would arise under a rule permitting 'reasonable' regulation of speech and press)."

• National Rifle Association (.pdf):
"This outcome would cause grave harm not only to the tens of millions of law-abiding Americans who keep and bear arms for self-defense and other lawful, private purposes, but to the entire nation, which in times of gravest peril has always relied upon the body of ordinary men and women, and their everyday familiarity with arms, for its security.

"This individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right; the Second Amendment on its face describes it as essential to a 'free State'—a democratic state free from government tyranny. As with the fundamental democratic rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, laws burdening Second Amendment rights should be subjected to strict scrutiny and struck down in their entirety when overly broad. Petitioners and their supporting amici attempt to conjure fears of legal bedlam should courts examine firearms laws under strict scrutiny, yet they present no real argument that long-standing laws regulating the ownership and use of firearms, such as laws barring ownership by convicted felons or the insane, would fail to pass muster under that test.

"While, to be sure, the Second Amendment refers to the utility of an armed population in preventing government tyranny, the Framers did not consider the right limited to that purpose. The Framers were well aware that in late-18th century America a significant segment of the population depended upon private ownership of arms to provide food for their families and to defend themselves and their families from attack. Americans' personal right to possess such firearms for hunting or self-defense was part of the essence of the Framers' view of themselves as a free and democratic people. Had Americans in 1787 been told that the federal government could ban the frontiersman in his log cabin, or the city merchant living above his store, from keeping firearms to provide for and protect himself and his family, it is hard to imagine that the Constitution would have been ratified."