Do you have a right to "bear arms"?: in the more than 200 years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court has never ruled on what the Second Amendment really means. But that may be about to change.

• Author: Greenhouse, Linda
• Position: NATIONAL

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For the first time since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the Constitution gives individuals the right to keep guns in their homes for private use. The case plunges the nine Justices into the long-running debate over how to interpret the Second Amendment's guarantee of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms."

The case the Justices will hear this spring is an appeal from the District of Columbia, whose gun-control law--the strictest in the nation--was struck down by a lower federal court last year.

"This case is very likely to produce the most significant Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment in our history," says Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

INDIVIDUALS OR MILITIAS?

In more than 200 years, the Court has never decided the fundamental question of whether the Second Amendment refers to individuals or militias. Where the Justices come down on this issue will have a huge impact on federal, state, and local gun-control laws.

One of the most disputed passages in the Constitution, the Second Amendment states, in its entirety: "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."

The Supreme Court has never directly addressed the basic meaning of those words. When it last considered a Second Amendment case, United States v. Miller, in 1939, the Court addressed a peripheral question, holding that a sawed-off shotgun was not one of the "arms" that the Founding Fathers had in mind.

The 1939 ruling suggested, without explicitly deciding, that the Second Amendment right should be understood in connection with service in a militia. That ruling helped support a scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only the right of the states to maintain militias--and served as the legal basis for federal, state, and local gun-control laws regulating individual ownership of guns.

For three decades, starting in the 1960s, the story of gun control was one of notorious crimes and laws passed in response, beginning with the 1968 federal gun-control law that followed the assassinations of Senator Robert E Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1994, Congress passed an assault weapons ban and created d national system of background checks for gun buyers.

Today, there are some 280 million firearms in private hands in...