Protection is only a right to acquire.

The plaintiffs challenge only the City's ban on firing ranges, so our first question is whether range training is categorically unprotected by the Second Amendment. Heller and McDonald suggest to the contrary. The Court emphasized in both cases that the "central component" of the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for defense of self, family, and home. Heller, 554 U.S. at 599; McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3048. [**48] The right to possess firearms for protection implies a corresponding right to acquire and maintain proficiency in their use; the core right wouldn't mean much without the training and practice that make it effective. Several passages in Heller support this understanding. Examining post- Civil War legal commentaries to confirm the founding-era "individual right" understanding of the Second Amendment, the Court quoted at length from the "massively popular 1868 Treatise on Constitutional Limitations" by judge and professor Thomas Cooley: "[T]o bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them . . . ; it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order." 554 U.S. at 616, 617-18 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also id. at 619 ("'No doubt, a citizen who keeps a gun or pistol under judicious precautions, practices in safe places the use of it, and in due time teaches his sons to do the same, exercises his individual right.'" (quoting Benjamin Vaughan Abbott, Judge and Jury: A Popular Explanation of the Leading Topics in the Law of the Land 333 (1880))).