“If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of criminal acts reduced by such legislation. – Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.” “Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. Halbrook, “That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right” If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 17 states such a thesis.” “In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the “collective” right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms. “Historical examination of the right to bear arms, from English antecedents to the drafting of the Second Amendment, bears proof that the right to bear arms has consistently been, and should still be, construed as an individual right.” “You know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.” Cicero”, in a letter to the State Gazette of South Carolina, 1788 Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.” “No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved in its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.” “The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God and Nature.” “Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers This political judgement, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self preservation a duty to God. – Frederick Douglass, famed civil rights leader in 1867, in response to post-Civil War segregation laws “A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” “Man has to wring Liberty not only from tyrants, but also from his fellow men who are not only unwilling to fight for it, but to let anyone else fight for it.” If you don’t have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.” “Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. “A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves… and include all men capable of bearing arms.” The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave.” “Arms are the only true badge of liberty. “The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only with the consent of the governed.” the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” “Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms.
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