‘Regular’ guy takes aim at the law

Richard Anthony Heller was the right man at the right time to challenge the District’s 32-year-old ban on handguns in the Supreme Court, his attorneys say.

The face behind the landmark case, they said, could not be a tobacco-spitting or camouflage-wearing caricature of a gun-rights advocate ripe to be picked apart by the press.

In the 66-year-old Heller, they found an everyman with a spotless background and genuine interest in protecting his constitutional right to bear arms.

Mr. Heller’s lawyers said he had the perfect combination of character traits to be the “regular citizen” in such a monumental case.

“You don’t have to be a ‘gun nut’ to petition for your rights,” said Clark Neely, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who worked on the District of Columbia v. Heller case. “It’s not a surprise that this case ended up being about citizens.”

Being a special police officer providing armed security at federal buildings in the District added to Mr. Heller’s credibility and highlighted what he and his team saw as an infringement on his rights.

“We were looking for people with good stories,” said the lead attorney in the case, Alan Gura of the D.C. firm Gura and Possesky.

Mr. Heller’s life story is somewhat meandering, and he sometimes has a hard time recalling the chronology and finer details.

“I have to look at my resume to know what I’ve done,” he said.

A self-described Army brat, Mr. Heller lived in several states, in France and other places in Europe as his father moved from station to station.

He attended 20 schools in 12 years. Upon graduating from high school, he went into the Army, because he started to clash with his father. He spent his three years of service stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky.where he was a paratrooper.

“Women want to get away from home because of friction with their mother, so they marry the first guy that comes along,” he said. “I wanted to get away from friction with my father, so I said, ‘OK, Dad, I’ll be cool, I’m going to the military.’”

After leaving the Army in 1962, Mr. Heller moved to the Districtand worked for a bank and then NASA as a computer clerk using skills he picked up “playing with [computer] punch cards” as a teenager.

He learned how to use some of the first computers from his father, who performed data processing of medical supplies in the Army.

Mr. Heller earned an engineering degree from Montgomery Community College in 1966 and became a computer programmer. He did that for several years and became a stockbroker in 1978, working for “small boutique” finance firms that operated locally.

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