A reporter asked, “It’s been a long time coming for you, sir. Are you encouraged?” Heller forced a smile. “It’s been a long battle,” he stated flatly.

For scholars of constitutional law, there is no questioning the momentous change Heller wrought. “We live in a world where, in part because of Heller, every single American has the right to own a gun in their own home for self defense,” says Adam Winkler, the UCLA constitutional law professor whose book, Gunfight, chronicled the Heller case. “His lawsuit paved the way for literally hundreds of other lawsuits. So I think his influence has really been quite huge.”

For the gun lobby and its Republican allies, preserving the victory they were handed via Heller has become a rallying point in every Supreme Court nomination fight that has taken place since. Now that President Barack Obama has picked federal judge Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the Heller decision, the National Rifle Association has used the centrist jurist’s ambiguous views on gun rights to declare him unacceptable for confirmation—a reminder of how far it will go to protect the gains delivered by his case.

But don’t try venerating Heller to Dick Heller himself. As his failed mission at the D.C. police station vividly illustrated, the ruling was not quite the sweeping gun-freedom victory he and many others had first thought. Instead, the win was just a single turning point in an all-out war with the precedent that had governed the regulation of guns in America for centuries.

He has spent the last seven years sparring in court with the District of Columbia over an evolving list of gun regulations authorities enacted that were designed to minimally comply with the ruling that bears his name. Over that time, he has grown increasingly disillusioned over the intransigence of courts and legislators, a frustration that has brought his anti-government views bubbling to the surface. Asked to serve as the Rosa Parks of the gun-rights movement, he’s come to embody something else: a belief, now dominant in gun-rights circles, that Heller didn’t go nearly far enough to abolish gun regulations once and for all.

Dick Heller’s telling of how he made constitutional history begins with what almost sounds like the setup to a sitcom: “Two guys livin’ in a basement apartment in Washington.” But it quickly becomes clear that this story and its narrator had a serious mission. Its other character—the second guy in the apartment—was Heller’s tenant-roomate, Dane vonBreichenruchardt. Together, as Heller later recalled, they would spend at least a decade plotting to overthrow D.C.’s gun laws before the lawsuit got filed in 2003. (Heller did not respond to requests for comment.)

Supported by Heller’s pay as a security guard, vonBreichenruchardt served as Heller’s constitutional muse and a “handler of sorts,” according to Reasonmagazine’s Brian Doherty’s history of the case, Gun Control on Trial. Living across the street from a public housing project’s open-air drug peddling and gunplay, the two in 1996 started the U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation, which vonBreichenruchardt ran as a vehicle to advance his wide-ranging libertarian views on small government, the gold standard, and guns.