The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment's protection of the right to bear arms is effective not only against incursions by the federal government, but also against incursions by state and local government.
As late as the 19th century, the Court typically held that the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government's power. More recently, the trend has been to extend the limitations to state and local government via the 14th Amendment.
Update:
Justice Alito wrote:
Chicago and Oak Park (municipal respondents) maintain that a right set out in the Bill of Rights applies to the States only when it is an indispensable attribute of any “‘civilized’” legal system. If it is possible to imagine a civilized country that does not recognize the right, municipal respondents assert, that right is not protected by due process. And since there are civilized countries that ban or strictly regulate the private possession of handguns, they maintain that due process does not preclude such measures. . . .
[T]he constitutional Amendments adopted in the Civil War’s aftermath fundamentally altered the federal system. Four years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, this Court held in the Slaughter-House Cases, that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only those rights “which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws,” and that the fundamental rights predating the creation of the Federal Government were not protected by the Clause. Under this narrow reading, the Court held that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only very limited rights. Subsequently, the Court held that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government in [the] decisions on which the Seventh Circuit relied in this case [to rule against gun rights in the decision now on appeal]. [citations excluded]
After the Civil War and the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the Court began to sort through which rights were so fundamental that no civilized society was imaginable without them. It found that freedom of speech was fundamental, but the right to a grand jury indictment was not. The standard then shifted to "whether a particular Bill of Rights protection is fundamental to our Nation’s particular scheme of ordered liberty and system of justice." Justice Alito concludes: "Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present, and the Heller Court [striking down a federal gun ban] held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right." In Heller, the Court found that handguns were the quintessential tool for defense of home and family.
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