Monday, March 25, 2013

Former Chief Justice Warren Burger on the Second Amendment

"[The Second Amendment] has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

         --- Former Chief Justice Warren Burger, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, December 16, 1991

3 comments:

  1. Oh, well. Not the key adjective, former, in front of his name. Lots of good legal scholars, including Laurence Tribe and Joyce Lee Malcolm, disagree.

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  2. And Justice Alex Kozinski, judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stated the following,

    "The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."

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  3. And then we have this comment from United States Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story,

    "The importance of this article [Second Amendment to the United States Constitution] will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."

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