Second Amendment Articles & Quotes

A double-amputee Iraq-war vet is suing Michael Moore for $85 million, claiming the portly peacenik recycled an old interview and used it out of context to make him appear anti-war in "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Sgt. Peter Damon, 33, who strongly supports America's invasion of Iraq, said he never agreed to be in the 2004 movie, which trashes President Bush.

In the 2003 interview, which he did at Walter Reed Army Hospital for NBC News, he discussed only a new painkiller the military was using on wounded vets.

"They took the clip because it was a gut-wrenching scene," Damon said yesterday. "They sandwiched it in. [Moore] was using me as ammunition."

Damon seems to "voice complaint about the war effort" in the movie, according to the lawsuit.

But what the father of two from Middleborough, Mass., was really talking about was the "excruciating" pain he felt after he lost his arms when a Black Hawk helicopter exploded in front of him.

Damon wasn't expressing any opinion about the war, the suit charges, but rather extolling the drug.

"I just want everybody to know what kind of a guy Michael Moore is, and what kind of film this is," said Damon. He has appeared in two films attacking "Fahrenheit" -"Michael Moore Hates America" and "Fahrenhype 9/11."

In "Fahrenheit 9/11," the bandaged National Guardsman is shown laying on a gurney complaining that he feels like he's "being crushed in a vise. But they [the drugs] do a lot to help it and they take a lot of the edge off it."

His image appears seconds after Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) says, "You know, they say they're not leaving any veterans behind, but they're leaving all kinds of veterans behind."

Damon - the dad of a 8-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy - doesn't come close to feeling that way.

"I'm the most fortunate disabled guy. I've even had a house built for me [by a nonprofit group, Home for Our Troops]."

Particularly outrageous to Damon is the fact that Moore never interviewed him or asked his permission to use the old clip.

"I was complaining about the pain I would've been having [if it weren't for the painkiller]," he said.

NBC is named in the suit - which was filed in Suffolk County, Mass., on Friday - along with Harvey and Robert Weinstein, Miramax Corp., Lions Gate Films and other production companies involved with the picture.

Newsman Brian Williams ends the NBC clip by adding, "These men, with catastrophic wounds are . . . completely behind the war effort," according to the lawsuit.

That part, which wasn't shown in the Moore movie, is a far more accurate depiction of Damon's feelings, he said.

Lawyer Dennis Lynch said he took the case last year and they held off filing the lawsuit in a bid to settle the matter.

"We attempted to resolve the situation amicably with Mr. Moore [for a year] but he refused," he said.

Damon is asking for up to $75 million because of "loss of reputation, emotional distress, embarrassment, and personal humiliation."

In addition, his wife is suing for another $10 million because of the "mental distress and anguish suffered by her spouse."

Spokeswomen for NBC and Harvey and Robert Weinstein would not comment because they haven't seen the suit. Lions Gate doesn't comment on pending litigation, a rep said.

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Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

This basic philosophy is the foundation of the American psyche and way of life. However, without life, the pursuit of happiness and liberty would not exist. The ability to preserve these rights should be as fundamental as the rights themselves. Our nation's sovereignty is dependent upon our own defense. Likewise, an individual's ability to defend himself is crucial to his survival.

Our country did not become the great nation it is today by cowering in fear when threatened by those who wish us harm. Why, then, should we ask our citizens to avoid conflict when conflict is brought upon them?

Those who oppose the "stand your ground" bill argue that it is a "shoot first, ask questions later" piece of legislation. This is simply not the case. I believe that the people of this state have the capacity to judge when their lives are threatened and to act accordingly. Senate Bill 396 merely gives them the freedom to make that judgment call without fear of prosecution or retribution should this unfortunate situation ever present itself.

The legislation says that if a law-abiding citizen is in any place where he legally has the right to be and reasonably believes it necessary to use force - even deadly force - to prevent death of himself or another, then he has every right to stand his ground and meet force with force.

As Americans, we place a great value on human life. Most valuable are our own lives and the lives of those closest to us—our spouse, our children. When those things most precious to us are threatened, we absolutely should have every right to protect them without question.

This is the most basic of American rights afforded to us by the Founders. We would not be who we are today without the right to take up arms and defend ourselves against those who seek to do us harm.

On Tuesday, May 10, 2005, America became a true police state. Your U.S. senators voted -- unanimously, with no discussion, and without even reading the bill -- to create a national ID card.

The Real ID Act blackmails state governments into turning their drivers licenses into a draconian tool of the federal homeland security apparatus. If states refuse, their citizens lose such "privileges" as being allowed to board an airplane, enter a federal building, or apply for social security. President Bush is expected to sign the bill eagerly on Thursday.

In three years -- by May 2008 -- this Stalin-style internal passport will be an American reality. But your government will have more control over you than Stalin ever dreamed in his most violent, vicious, anti-freedom dreams. (See links to the text of the law and articles about it at the bottom of this article.)

But that's only the beginning.

The creator of the Real ID Act, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, smiles and tells us that his Real ID Act is all about "solving illegal immigration" or "preventing terrorists from entering the country." This is one of the biggest of the thousands of "Big Lies" we've heard from the tyrants in Washington. The Real ID Act is about tracking and controlling Americans. You. Me. Our children. Everybody.

In May 2008, barring a miracle, America as we once knew it will be in ruins. It will be gone. And the rights of gun owners will be among the first scheduled for destruction.

GUN OWNERS: PREPARE TO RESIST

Here's your future:

You walk into a gun store, fill out your 4473, and show your government ID just as you now do. But instead of looking at your license and taking down some information, the clerk runs the license (which is likely to contain a radio-frequency ID chip) through a scanner. Your purchase is instantly recorded in your state drivers license registry. The federal government isn't currently allowed to keep a gun registry. But no problem; the Real ID act gives them an open door into your state records.
Complete information on every firearm you buy will be instantly available to every police officer (and possibly every government employee, store clerk, or computer hacker) you ever encounter. You'll be an instant criminal suspect every time you deal with someone who has access to the database.
Just as travelers are encouraged to get background checks and give fingerprints to avoid some of the worst excesses of TSA screening, gun owners will be encouraged to get background checks and give whatever biometric ID the Department of Homeland Security requires. This will be sold as a "benefit," ensuring you'll never again experience an "instant-check" delay. In fact, Congress, the ATF, or the FBI might even "mandate" 5-day or 15-day delays for anyone not enrolled in the "Trusted Firearms Buyer" program.
The private purchase "loophole" will be closed, so that all gun buyers must make trackable purchases. (The ultimate goal is for every purchase of every kind to be trackable.)
Buying ammo? The store scans your national ID card and -- bingo! -- your purchase is registered in the state database.
The federal government or state governments can now also _effectively_ legislate limits on the amount or kind of ammunition you're "allowed" to purchase. Try to buy more and the database instantly rejects you.
The federal government or state governments can now also _effectively_ legislate limits on the number of guns you may own. Try to buy more, and the database rejects you.
Eventually -- after the federal government "discovers" the obvious, that national ID won't stop either illegal immigration or terrorism -- the old attack on "evil guns" will resume. When they want your .50 BMG they'll know just where to find it (because the Real ID act says your home address _must_ be revealed). When they want your evil "scoped sniper rifle" (you know, the one you hunt deer with), they'll know just how to get it. Ditto with you "Saturday Night Special" or your "assault weapon."
If you don't surrender your guns, well, then the Department of Homeland Security will cut off your driving "privilege," as well as your right to escape the growing police state via plane. You'll be a prisoner in your own home, in your own country. Or you'll be forced to function as an outlaw, operating and living a precarious existence beneath the government radar.

PARANOID? OR PAYING ATTENTION?

You say these projections are ridiculous? That we're paranoid?

Well, frankly, if the Real ID Act doesn't make you paranoid, you're not paying enough attention. We ask you to consider the long-term impact of a few other acts of government.

In the 1930s, Congress promised us that our social security numbers would never, absolutely never, be used for identification. Now, they're the key to everything about us -- and without a social security number you won't get a drivers license and you won't even be "allowed" to drive after May 2008.

In 1913, Congress and the media swore to us that the brand- new income tax would only affect the rich. Well, how rich do you feel after paying 40 percent of your income (or more!) in taxes?

This is the way government works. They've even got a term for it: mission creep. And there is no creepier mission than the mission the federal government has currently set itself: to track everyone, everywhere, and to control what we do.

We warned you in The State vs. the People that this was coming. That book is still relevant, still a good read, and still filled with information about what our future will be like in this new American police state.

Be forewarned. Be aware.

REAL ID: IT'S THE LAW AND IT'S CRIMINAL

Please take a moment to go to this site: http://www.rebelfirerock.com/home.html. Click on the link that leads to the song "Justice Day." Listen to the music or read the lyrics. Here's the opening of the song:

You're the boot.
Stomping on the human face forever.
You're the eye.
Staring down on everyone and ever seeing all.
You're the lie.
Twisting all our minds into your whoredom.
You are Death.
You are war.
You are slavery.
You're the law.
You're the law.
You're the LAW!

George Orwell was the first to describe totalitarianism as a "boot stomping on the human face forever." But in Orwell's day Americans would have had a hard time believing that the law -- the good old, all-American legislature -- all those smiling senators and "representatives" would be the ones to plant their iron heels in our faces. Back in those innocent days, we imagined tyranny would come from outside.

Well, tyranny is here. And it's a gift from the very people we so trustingly put into office.

Tyranny is THE LAW.

Is this a way to run a country? Tacking something as onerous as national ID onto a must-pass bill and making it law without any debate? What does this say about people the gun owners consider their friends? In the House, where the bill containing the Real ID Act passed 368-58, only three Republicans voted against it. Here's the final roll-call vote so you can see how your own congressperson voted.

In the Senate, not one person cared enough about freedom to vote against it -- or even to demand that senators discuss it.

(The Real ID Act originally passed the House in February as a standalone bill (H.R. 418) by a vote of 261-to-161. House leaders, realizing national ID would have been in trouble in the Senate, then added it to a must-pass military appropriations bill in a cynical ploy to make it almost impossible to fight national ID.)

Turning America into a full-fledged police state was just business as usual to your representatives. And, just as Adolf Hitler scrupulously followed German law while committing his horrors, so your "representatives" and the bureaucrats you face at the national-ID drivers license bureau will also be following the law -- the Real ID law that allows them to enslave you.

(To see what a real Bill of Rights leader would do, read the novel Hope by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith)

WHAT NEXT?

We have two choices now: Resist or submit.

More than 600 organizations, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Governors Association, opposed the bill. Even the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (which loves national ID and was largely responsible for an earlier attempt at such legislation nine years ago) criticized it.

We can expect lawsuits against national ID, including at least one suit led by state governments.

However, nearly all the opposition from state governments focuses on one area: They're upset because the federal government didn't offer them extra money to enslave us. If Congress bribes them with enough millions and billions, they'll gladly sell our freedom.

Ultimately, real resistance is up to us, as individuals. There are certain courses of action JPFO cannot recommend. But every freedom lover should be pleased if all the people who had a hand in creating Real ID act lost their jobs -- soon. And those individuals who truly value their (and their children's) futures should seriously consider making national ID their line in the sand.

We have already heard from many people saying they will drive without a license rather than submit to a license that has become a Stalinist control document. We just hope their resolve stays equally strong when they face a world in which it's impossible to buy, sell, retire, travel -- or buy a gun -- without national ID.

We ask you to remember men like Alexandr Solzhenitzyn and Natan Sharansky. Both stood up and boldly opposed a tyrannical regime in the Soviet Union. Both risked their lives. Both suffered horribly for their resistance and their protests. But eventually, they triumphed -- and the Soviet Union crumbled.

We are in need of such people, and such courage, today. We cannot wait for someone else to stand up and show that kind of integrity.

We must become the kind of people we admire if we are ever again to live in a nation we can trust.

G-d help us if we fail.*

- The Liberty Crew

ABOUT THE REAL ID ACT

Text of the law (this may change; you can also go to http://thomas.loc.gov and search for H.R.1268, which is the act as it was incorporated into the appropriations bill).

"No Real Debate for Real ID"

"Last Chance to Stop National ID" (written before Senate passage)

* We spell G-d this way because in Judaism it is considered a sign of respect. We spell out the name of the Creator only in sacred settings.

Joyce, a recent widow, is a nurse by profession. Her son, a police officer, encouraged her to acquire a handgun because of her frequent traveling. She has a Indiana handgun license and has taken a tactical handgun course in Ohio, certified in three levels.

On February 11th, Joyce traveled to Vermont to visit a friend, a trip she has made many times before. On her return through the Albany NY airport, she declared her very expensive handgun through the airlines. Per TSA and federal regulations, the firearms was unloaded and in its original case with a cable lock through the barrel. It had two exterior locks and the ammo and magazines were in another case locked in the same manner.

Instead of asking a federal employee to inspect the locked firearm as had happened in the past, the airline ticket agent asked a young Albany deputy sheriff to do it (there is a sheriff office located inside the airport). The officer pulled her out of line and took her to a room where he eventually fingerprinted, photographed and arrested her. He confiscated her gun without a receipt and she was never read her Miranda rights.

Two female officers then led Joyce to another room where all of her possessions were searched and she was subjected to a physical hand search under her clothing. After she posted a bond, she was escorted back to the airline ticket agent, where she had to buy another ticket from another airline because she missed her connection due to the unjustified arrest.

After purchasing her new ticket -- all the time under observation of the female officers -- she was taken back to another room and was put through the humiliating search AGAIN.

Joyce did everything the airlines and the TSA demanded of her. Yet merely because she legally possessed a firearm, she was treated as if she were a criminal.

It's become increasingly apparent that the airlines do not care about your rights. Concerns about rights are dismissed in the name of "safety." But ironically, it's becoming increasingly apparent that they do not care about your safety either.

Recently, _Consumer Reports_ magazine (www.consumerreports.org) investigated air-safety concerns. The article, entitled "An Accident Waiting to Happen?" appears in their March 2007 issue. CR found that in addition to outsourcing baggage handling and food service, airlines have begun outsourcing airplane _maintenance_ as well, more than half their major maintenance in 2005!

States the article, "Contract repair facilities, especially those overseas, are subject to less oversight ... with fewer screening programs for works, fewer inspections, and loopholes that allow even more subcontracting."

At the same time, CR reports, the FAA is REDUCING actual inspections by its own staff, relying instead on statistical analysis and self-reporting by the airlines. According to NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System, technicians have reported finding "broken, loose, and missing wheel tie bolts on wheels built up by a contract- maintenance facility."

Interestingly, these same contract maintenance facilities are not always subject to the same levels of screening as in-house operations. States Linda Goodrich, FAA inspector and union executive, "The inspector is basically rendered useless overseas."

The airlines like to cite 9-11 as the reason they have lost over $35 billion in revenue between 2001 and 2006. Perhaps they should consider spending less time harrassing widows and disarming law-abiding citizens, and more time on maintaining the safety of their planes.

As for Joyce, she's in the process of contacting an Albany law firm to take on her case. For further information on her case, you may wish to contact the Knox Firearms Coalition at www.nealknox.com or Gun Owners of America

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
U.S. Constitution, Amendment II

Earlier this year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the District of Columbia’s stringent gun-control regulations, ruling squarely that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

In the cultural and legal battle over gun control, the decision was the proverbial shot heard ’round the world.

The ruling—in Parker v. District of Columbia—marked the first time a gun law has been found unconstitutional based on the Second Amendment, and it set up a direct conflict among the circuits. Nine federal appeals courts around the nation have adopted the view that the amendment guarantees only the collective right of organized state militias to bear arms, not an individual’s right. (A 5th Circuit panel found that individuals have gun rights but upheld the regulation in question, so both sides claim that ruling as a victory.)

In May, when the full D.C. Circuit Court refused to grant a rehearing en banc, the stage seemed set for a showdown in the Supreme Court, which has thus far managed to dodge the question of whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms.

According to HLS Professor Mark Tushnet, author of “Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can’t End the Battle Over Guns” (Oxford University Press, 2007), earlier petitions were cluttered by issues that allowed the Court to decline review or avoid the Second Amendment question. But Parker “is more straightforward,” Tushnet says, and the Court will have a tougher time avoiding the issue.

If Parker is the long-awaited “clean” case, one reason may be that proponents of the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment—including the National Rifle Association, which filed an amicus brief in the case—have learned from earlier defeats, and crafted strategies to maximize the chances of Supreme Court review. For one thing, it is a civil case, not a criminal one, and the six plaintiffs, in the words of NRA President Sandra Froman ’74, are “ordinary people whose lives are impacted by not having the right to protect themselves.” They include a woman who lives in a high-crime area and has been threatened by drug dealers, a gay man assaulted because of his sexual orientation and a special police officer for the Federal Judicial Center.

In addition, the laws challenged in Parker are among the most stringent in the nation: Handguns cannot be registered in the district; those registered before a 1976 ban cannot be carried from one room to another without a license; and any firearm in a home must be kept unloaded and either locked or disassembled.

Also important, says Tushnet, is the fact that because Parker emanates from the District of Columbia, where only federal law applies, it doesn’t involve the overlaying question of whether the Second Amendment applies to a state by way of the 14th Amendment—a question that clouded an earlier case involving one city’s complete ban on handgun possession. He adds that a number of states urged the Court not to take that case, and the solicitor general did the same in another one.

Pro-gun activists like Froman are confident that the Court will hear an appeal by the district in Parker, and they say that they couldn’t have gotten this far without help from an unlikely quarter: liberal law professors. In the past 20 years, several prominent legal scholars known for liberal views, including Professor Laurence Tribe ’66, have come to believe that the Second Amendment supports the individual-rights view. In the 2000 edition of his treatise “American Constitutional Law,” Tribe broke from the 1978 and 1988 editions by endorsing that view. Other liberal professors, including Akhil Reed Amar at Yale Law School and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas at Austin, agree.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Tribe said in a recent New York Times interview. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

Froman says the fact that Tribe and others reversed their interpretation in recent years has had enormous influence. Indeed, the majority opinion in Parker, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman ’61, referred specifically to Tribe’s revised conclusion.

The 27 words of the Second Amendment may be the most hotly contested in the Constitution. Gun-control advocates and opponents read its tortured syntax entirely differently. Each side resorts to what Tushnet calls “a simplified version of constitutional analysis” to support its viewpoint, looking solely at the wording of the amendment and what the language meant in 1791 rather than at whether society has changed in the meantime and what judicial precedents offer guidance. In “virtually no other area in constitutional law” is analysis done that way, he says, although he’s not sure why.

“There’s very little guidance on what the actual meaning of the Second Amendment is,” says Froman, a Tucson lawyer who was interviewed by the Bulletin when she returned to HLS in early April to speak on a panel. “The courts have talked a lot about the Second Amendment but have always been nibbling around the periphery. There’s never really been ‘Let’s explain and elaborate on what it means.’”

For Anthony A. Williams ’87, who served as mayor of the District of Columbia from 1999 until earlier this year and vigorously enforced the district’s gun laws during his tenure, the meaning of the amendment is unambiguous, no matter what interpretive theory is used. “Let’s take [Justice Antonin] Scalia’s approach,” he says. “I think the framers’ intent was to see to it that [through] militias, states as sovereign entities had a right to arm themselves. To me, it’s not about individuals—it’s about groups.”

But Froman firmly reaches the opposite conclusion: “A lot of people say that the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment—the words ‘A well regulated militia …’— limits the active clause pertaining to bearing arms. They want to say that means you can only exercise the right to keep and bear arms as part of a militia, meaning as part of the National Guard, forgetting that the National Guard didn’t exist then.”

“Remember,” Froman adds, “the Second Amendment guarantees a right—it does not confer a right. It’s God-given. It’s natural. The right of self-survival is a basic instinct of any organism.” The Constitution “acknowledges that.”

Tushnet believes that if the Court grants certiorari, it will ultimately overturn the decision of the D.C. panel. “My gut feeling is that there are not five votes to say the individual-rights position is correct,” he says. “[Justice Anthony] Kennedy comes from a segment of the Republican Party that is not rabidly pro-gun rights and indeed probably is sympathetic to hunters but not terribly sympathetic to handgun owners. Then the standard liberals will probably say ‘collective rights.’”

But Tribe is less confident of that prediction. Should the case reach the Supreme Court, he told The New York Times, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

If that happens, Tushnet says, it is unlikely to end all gun regulation, because the Court would probably tailor its decision narrowly to reach consensus. The three-judge panel in Parker struck down only D.C.’s tight laws. “Once you recognize [gun ownership] as an individual right, then the work shifts to figuring out what type of regulation is permissible,” he says.

Tushnet says the gun-control debate is an intractable one in which neither side will move, and a constitutional “answer” from the Supreme Court will be something of a nonstarter. Like the arguments over abortion and stem-cell research, he says, the argument over guns is in truth another battle in the culture wars and cannot be solved by constitutional analysis because neither side can be persuaded.

No gun-control strategy with any chance of surviving the political process would have a significant effect on overall gun violence or crime, Tushnet believes. To say so publicly would be the boldest and most honest stand that a major politician or candidate could take, he adds.

The tragic shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech seem to have changed no one’s position: “People responded to it in exactly the way you would expect,” Tushnet says. Supporters of gun control sought stricter laws and better enforcement, and the NRA advocated that teachers and others be armed to protect themselves.

Activists on both sides bear out that observation. Williams believes that the district’s gun laws were lowering the human and financial costs of gun-related violence. “When I started as mayor, we had well over 200 homicides a year,” he says. “We brought that down to below 160, so we made serious inroads in reducing violent crime; but still, in many neighborhoods, the situation is horrific.”

Says Froman: “Statistically, the parts of the country with the greatest number of firearms have the lowest rates of violent crime with guns. It’s easy to understand why. Let’s say there were 30 people in this room, and this was a state that allowed people to carry concealed weapons for self-defense, and a criminal walked in. At least half the people in the room would draw down on the criminal. That would be the end of it.”

Froman had nothing to do with guns until, some 25 years ago, someone tried to break into her Los Angeles home. “I was terrified,” she says. “It was a real epiphany for me, for someone who had never been a victim of crime, who never thought I needed to protect myself.” The next day, she walked into a gun shop to purchase a weapon. She has been a staunch gun advocate ever since.

Does Froman ever worry about repercussions, given that she’s at the center of such a heated issue? “I live in a very rural area, at the end of a long driveway,” she says. “People ask me, ‘Don’t you get scared?’ I say, ‘Are you kidding? I have a clear shot all the way to the road.’”

“What’s the bottom line? On balance, originalism supports some version of an individual-rights interpretation, although the case for such an interpretation is closer than proponents of the gun-rights position acknowledge, and the states’ rights interpretation preferred by gun-control advocates isn’t entirely ruled out by originalist interpretation. Approaching the question of interpreting the Second Amendment as judges do—that is, by treating original meaning as important but taking other matters, such as precedent, into account—changes the bottom line. Gun-control proponents have a significantly stronger case than their adversaries if we treat the question of interpreting the Second Amendment as an ordinary constitutional question and use all the interpretive tools judges ordinarily use.”