Do you and I have the right to bear arms? The Bush administration's Justice Department recently answered with an emphatic ``Yes.''

As gun-control advocates cried foul and gun-rights supporters cheered, the government filed Supreme Court briefs May 6 in two cases, officially weighing in on the debate about the Second Amendment to the federal Constitution. The Justice Department rejected the executive branch's longtime position that the right to own guns is a collective right given to state militias, claiming instead that the right belongs to individual gun owners.

The ``current position of the United States is that the Second Amendment more broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service'' to ``possess and bear their own firearms,'' the Justice Department said.

The briefs acknowledged that the government was reversing several decades of its own constitutional policy, as well as challenging trends in the lower courts since the 1930s.

This policy, though a break with the recent past, fits into a long historical tradition. Americans from the Founding Fathers to the early 1900s took for granted that the right to bear arms is a right of individuals -- not of the states or the National Guard.

This view of the Second Amendment as securing an individual right can be seen in the works of leading early constitutional commentators, such as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (who was educated in the law in the decade after the Bill of Rights was enacted), St. George Tucker and Thomas Cooley. It is supported by similar provisions in states' bills of rights, and in state legislatures' calls for a federal Bill of Rights.

The individual rights position was the nearly unanimous view of courts and commentators throughout the 1800s, and was endorsed by Congress in the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866.

It was only in the 1930s that elite legal opinion began to shift, as lower federal courts started to embrace the states' rights view. Lower court decisions in the 1970s and 1980s reinforced this interpretation. The Supreme Court has never definitively resolved the question, making the Justice Department's switch particularly significant.

Though the Bush administration's position supports the individual right to own a gun, the government briefs stress that this right is nevertheless limited, like freedom of speech and other individual rights. Just as libel and child pornography are not protected by the First Amendment, neither is ownership of guns by violent felons protected by the Second Amendment. Many current gun-control laws would be upheld even under the government's new position.

But if the Bush administration's Second Amendment theory becomes law, some changes are likely. The Washington, D.C., handgun ban, for example, would probably be struck down as too broad. Similar bans in Chicago and other cities also would be vulnerable, provided that the Supreme Court follows its past practice and applies the restrictions of the Bill of Rights not only to the federal government, but also to the states.

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EUGENE VOLOKH is a professor at the UCLA School of Law.
He specializes in constitutional law and wrote this article for Perspective.