Recently in the news there was case before the courts to determine if a person can have a loaded handgun in thier home for protection in DC.
District of Columbia v. Heller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Court of Appeals had struck down provisions of the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 as unconstitutional, and
determined that handguns are "Arms" that may not be banned by the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.), also striking down the portion of the law that requires all firearms including rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock."
Personally, I think the decision was good. An armed citizenry isn't a bad thing. If nothing else, an armed citizenry is the last line of defense against a tyrannical government. An unarmed population is entirely at the mercy of the government. In most democracies the layers of legal defense it takes to strip away the liberty of the people are extensive, but as the US and British knee jerk reactions to terrorism have shown, the people can slowly be convinced to give up their liberty over time. An armed population is a way of gaining that liberty back should it go too far to recover by legal means (i.e. marshal law is declared via a legal mechanism for some emergency and the government holds onto its new found power).
That said, I don't have a problem with some reasonable level of regulation, and I think the Supreme Court set a good precedent. They acknowledge that you have the right to have arms, and they acknowledged the state has a right to regulate them, but that regulation can't go so far as to disarm law abiding citizens.
District of Columbia v. Heller (Gun Control) 
