Here are some facts to prove it:

• Six Supreme Court Decisions:
  
  • in 1857 (Scott v. Sanford, 60 US 691, 705) that citizens rights include the right ‘‘to keep and carry arms wherever they want.’’

  • in 1876 (United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542, 553) that the Constitution did not grant a right to arms but that the right to arms long predates the Constitution and is not dependent upon that document for its existence.

  • in 1886 (Presser v. Illinois, 116 US 252) that ‘‘the states cannot prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms.’’

  • in 1895 (Beard v. United States, 158 US 550) that individuals have the right to possess and use firearms for self-defense.

  • in 1897 (Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 US 275) that the right to arms is an ancient and ‘‘fundamental’’ right, ‘‘inherited from our English ancestors,’’ and has existed ‘‘from time immemorial.’’

  • in 1990 (United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, No. 88-1353) that the term ‘‘the people,’’ as used in the First, Second and Fourth amendments, and elsewhere in the Constitution, means all the individuals who make up our national community, and that each of these rights are rights of the individual.

• The 1999 federal court ruling from the Northern District of Texas, U.S. vs Emerson, in which the federal judge overturned a federal gun law on Second Amendment grounds and argued, ‘‘The rights of the Second Amendment should be as zealously guarded as the other individual liberties enshrined in the bill of rights.’’

• In the last decade, scholars from across the political spectrum have concluded that the Second Amendment, from any method of analysis, protects an individual right, and that this view is now commonly referred to as the ‘‘Standard Model’’ (Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 1995).

• The nation’s leading constitutional scholars such as Lawrence Tribe (Harvard), Akil Reed Amar (Yale), William Van Alstyne (Duke), and Sanford Levinson (Texas) ascribe to the concept of the individual Second Amendment right as the ‘‘Standard Model.’’

• The conclusion of Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, of the University of Tennessee, that scholars adhering to an individual rights interpretation, ‘‘... dominate the academic literature on the Second Amendment almost completely,’’ and that this view is ‘‘... the mainstream scholarly interpretation.’’

• See also: the U.S. Code definition of Militia

1. ‘‘Testimony of Eugene Volokh on the Second Amendment, Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Sept. 23, 1998’’ originally at: http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/beararms/testimon.htm

2. Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Cong., 2d Sess., The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, 83-109 (1982)

3. Fables, Myths & Other Tall Tales about Gun Laws, Crime and Constitutional Rights and also NRA's Friend of the Court Brief regarding U.S. V. Emerson

4. The Supreme Court’s Thirty-five Other Gun Cases: What the Supreme Court Has Said about the Second Amendment By David B. Kopel