The Supreme Court finally released its decision in the Heller case, and by a frighteningly narrow margin (5-4) held that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to own firearms.

Professor Randy Barnett has an excellent analysis of the decision here.

I would only add this point. If the drafters of the Constitution had intended the Second Amendment only to cover the right of governments to arm militia and thought it would be good to have government decide what weapons (if any) individuals would be allowed to own (which is the theory of the dissenters), they would have included in Article I, Section 8, which spells out the powers of Congress, language something like “Congress shall have the power to ban from private ownership any weapons deemed to be excessively dangerous.”

They didn’t put anything like that in because they didn’t think government had any business dictating things that people could or could not own.