Nonetheless, we have made clear that individual rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and made applicable against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment have the same scope as against the Federal Government. See, e.g., Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 7); Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2019) (slip op., at 2–3); Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1, 10–11 (1964).
And we have generally assumed that the scope of the protection applicable to the Federal Government and States is pegged to the public understanding of the right when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791. See, e.g., Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36, 42–50 (2004) (Sixth Amendment); Virginia v. Moore, 553 U. S. 164, 168– 169 (2008) (Fourth Amendment); Nevada Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, 564 U. S. 117, 122–125 (2011) (First Amendment). We also acknowledge that there is an ongoing scholarly debate on whether courts should primarily rely on the prevailing understanding of an individual right when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 when defining its scope (as well as the scope of the right against the Federal Government). See, e.g., A. Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction xiv, 223, 243 (1998); K. Lash, ReSpeaking the Bill of Rights: A New Doctrine of Incorporation (Jan. 15, 2021) (manuscript, at 2),
https://papers.ssrn .com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3766917 (“When the people adopted the Fourteenth Amendment into existence, they readopted the original Bill of Rights, and did so in a manner that invested those original 1791 texts with new 1868 meanings”). We need not address this issue today because, as we explain below, the public understanding of the right to keep and bear arms in both 1791 and 1868 was, for all relevant purposes, the same with respect to public carry.
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