When in early March the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the District’s restrictive gun laws were unconstitutional, over 70 years of legal thinking on the Second Amendement was upended and the nationwide debate over gun control was given new life. And with another decision by the court today, it looks like the matter will be settled by the Supreme Court.

We’ve just learned that this morning the Court of Appeals denied the District’s request for a new hearing before the full court, effectively pushing the case, Parker vs. District of Columbia, to the Supreme Court. The case, originally presented by six District residents, argued that the city’s gun laws, which date back to 1976 and forbid the ownership of handguns, unconstitutionally limited the residents’ Second Amendment rights.

Until this case was decided, many legal experts and courts had adopted an interpretation of the Second Amendment indicating that gun ownership was a collective right, but the new ruling disagreed, declaring that it was an individual right that could not be subjected to blanket prohibitions. The New York Times reported on Sunday that a number of prominent legal scholars, including liberal thinkers, have come to believe that the Founding Fathers intended gun ownership to be a matter of personal, not collective choice. The last time the Supreme Court dealt with a Second Amendment case of this scope was in 1939.

UPDATE: You can read more about the Court’s refusal to rehear en banc a test case on the validity of the law over at SCOTUSblog.