INDIVIDUAL GUN RIGHTS AFFIRMED

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Thursday embraced the long-disputed view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for personal use, ruling 5-4 that there is a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.

The landmark ruling overturned the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, the strictest gun-control law in the country, and appeared certain to usher in a fresh round of litigation over gun rights throughout the country.

The court rejected the view that the Second Amendment's "right of the people to keep and bear arms" applied to gun ownership only in connection with service in the "well regulated militia" to which the amendment refers.

Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion said that the justices were "aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country" and "take seriously" the arguments in favor of prohibiting handgun ownership.

"But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table," he said, adding: "It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."

Scalia's opinion was signed by Chief Justice John Roberts and by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens took vigorous issue with Scalia's assertion that it was the Second Amendment that had enshrined the individual right to own a gun.

Rather, it was "today's law-changing decision" that bestowed the right and created "a dramatic upheaval in the law," Stevens said in a dissent joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Breyer wrote a second dissenting opinion.

Scalia and Stevens went head to head in debating how the 27 words in the Second Amendment should be interpreted. Stevens said the majority opinion was based on "a strained and unpersuasive reading" of the text and history of the Second Amendment, which provides: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

According to Scalia, the "militia" reference in the first part of the amendment simply "announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia." The Constitution's framers were afraid that the new federal government would disarm the populace, as the British had tried to do, Scalia said.

But he added that this "prefatory statement of purpose" should not be interpreted to limit the meaning of what is called the operative clause - "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Instead, Scalia said, the operative clause "codified a pre-existing right" of individual gun ownership for private use.

Contesting that analysis, Stevens said the Second Amendment's structure was notable for its "omission of any statement of purpose related to the right to use firearms for hunting or personal self-defense," in contrast to the contemporaneous "Declarations of Rights" in Pennsylvania and Vermont that did explicitly protect those uses.

It has been nearly 70 years since the court last examined the meaning of the Second Amendment. In addition to their linguistic debate, Scalia and Stevens also sparred over what the court intended in that decision, United States v. Miller.

In the opaque, unanimous, five-page opinion issued in 1939, the court upheld a federal prosecution for transporting a sawed-off shotgun. A U.S. District Court had ruled that the provision of the National Firearms Act the defendants were accused of violating was barred by the Second Amendment, but the Supreme Court disagreed and reinstated the indictment.

For decades, the overwhelming majority of courts and commentators regarded the Miller decision as having rejected the individual-right interpretation of the Second Amendment. That understanding of the "virtually unreasoned case" was mistaken, Scalia said on Thursday.

He said the Miller decision meant "only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns."

Stevens said the majority's understanding of the Miller decision was not only "simply wrong," but also reflected a lack of "respect for the well-settled views of all of our predecessors on the court, and for the rule of law itself."

Despite the decision's enormous symbolic significance, it was far from clear that it actually posed much of a threat to the most common types of gun regulations. Scalia's opinion applied explicitly only to "the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home," and it contained a number of significant qualifications.

"Nothing in our opinion," Scalia said, "should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing 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 opinion also said that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons would be upheld, and suggested somewhat less explicitly that the right to personal possession did not apply to "dangerous and unusual weapons" that are not typically used for self-defense or recreation. The Bush administration had been concerned about the implications of the case for the federal ban on possession of machine guns.

President Bush welcomed the decision. "As a long-standing advocate of the rights of gun owners in America, I applaud the Supreme Court's historic decision today confirming what has always been clear in the Constitution: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear firearms," the president said in a statement.