Second Amendment Quotes: Pro-Gun Quotes on Individual Freedom and the Right to Bear Arms

“Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave.” – Andrew Fletcher

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms.” – Richard Henry Lee

“Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.” – Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese journalist

“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.” – Paul I. Wellman, The Iron Mistress

“A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” – Frederick Douglass, famed civil rights leader in 1867, in response to post-Civil War segregation laws

“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. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God and Nature.” – John Locke

“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. 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.” – St. George Tucker

“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. . . . 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.” – An unknown "M.T. Cicero", in a letter to the State Gazette of South Carolina, 1788

“You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.” – Rush Limbaugh

“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.” – U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings, U.S. v. Emerson (1999)

“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. 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 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.” – Stephen P. Halbrook, "That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right"

“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. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.” – Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

“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. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime.” – Senator Orrin Hatch

“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.” – Joseph Story, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice

“The Second Amendment wasn't written so you can go hunting, it was to create a force to balance a tyrannical force here.” – Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, 2013

“Let us hope our weapons are never needed – but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government – and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.” – Edward Abbey

“Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention 'the people,' the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset...The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms...The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.'” – Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

“Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right.” – Justice Antonin Scalia, District of Columbia v. Heller

“[T]he enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home. Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” – Justice Antonin Scalia, District of Columbia v. Heller

“By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our Nation, the amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the 2nd Amendment will always be important.” – John F. Kennedy

I’ll add to this with an article from Pravda,
yes THAT Pravda;
https://english.pravda.ru/opinion/123335-americans_guns/

Years ago I read that during WWII the Japanese actually thought about attacking our west coast but decided against it since we were too well armed.

bookmark

Bookmark.

“Politicians are the reason for the 2nd Amendment.” - Me

You really need to read the highly suppressed 1982 Senate report on the 2nd Amendment. I have a paper copy.

Read it and you will see why it is now out of print from the Government Printing Office. It is hard to find a full copy on line but I did find one.

https://guncite.com/journals/senrpt/senrpt.html

“The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.”

19th century cases
16. * Wilson v. State, 33 Ark. 557, at 560, 34 Am. Rep. 52, at 54 (1878).

“If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the (p.17)penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege.”

17. * Jennings v. State, 5 Tex. Crim. App. 298, at 300-01 (1878).

“We believe that portion of the act which provides that, in case of conviction, the defendant shall forfeit to the county the weapon or weapons so found on or about his person is not within the scope of legislative authority. * * * One of his most sacred rights is that of having arms for his own defence and that of the State. This right is one of the surest safeguards of liberty and self-preservation.”

18. * Andrews v. State, 50 Tenn. 165, 8 Am. Rep. 8, at 17 (1871).

“The passage from Story (Joseph Story: Comments on the Constitution) shows clearly that this right was intended, as we have maintained in this opinion, and was guaranteed to and to be exercised and enjoyed by the citizen as such, and not by him as a soldier, or in defense solely of his political rights.”

19. * Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. (1 Kel.) 243, at 251 (1846).

“’The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.’ The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State.”

And the SCOTUS case that led to the Civil War..

Are Negros citizens...Dred Scott
“It would give to persons of the negro race, who are recognized as citizens in any one state of the Union, the right to enter every other state, whenever they pleased.... and it would give them full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might meet; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to KEEP AND CARRY ARMS wherever they went.”

“When men give up their freedom willingly in the name of security, they will soon lose even that degraded security.”—CICERO-2000 years ago.

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction.
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?

Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.”
~ Cesare Beccaria

This is a great one:

"But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.”

Pay particular attention to the wording in part 2 below!

U.S. Supreme Court

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)

PART 1

The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.

PART 2

The Second Amendment means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/92/542/

Then There’s That Second Amendment.
Opening Remarks on the Resolution that the Right to Bear Arms
is Still an Essential Safeguard for Freedom.
by Mrs. Tanya K. Metaksa, Executive Director
NRA Institute for Legislative Action
YALE POLITICAL UNION
September 12, 1995

Our Founding Fathers did not create our civil liberties — the very
heart and soul of our personal and national lives. They secured those
liberties. They safeguarded them. This Bill of Rights is our
guarantee of freedom.

Then there’s that Second Amendment.

Mankind and womankind had freedom of expression as a natural right.
Humans had freedom of religious expression before reaching the shores
of this country. Even though the right to worship had been
systematically denied the human race for centuries, it was our right
to assert, our right to secure.

Then there’s that Second Amendment.

All these great rights are ours. All these great rights are the
machinery that propels this Republic. Take away one right, weaken one
civil liberty, and the machine of freedom starts sputtering, tearing
itself apart like an engine that’s thrown a rod, grinding to a halt
and leaving us stranded on the side of an abandoned road, a road
patrolled only by a mob.

And then there’s that Second Amendment.

Conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, we all know it’s
true. Diminish freedom of the press, and we diminish democracy.
Usher out the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and you usher
in a police state. Abandon the safeguard against unreasonable
searches and seizures, and we abandon our homes.

And then there’s that Second Amendment.

What’s it really all about anyway?

Could it be that the Founding Fathers, after protecting religious
freedom, then set about to protect hunting?

Could it be that the Founding Fathers, after safeguarding free speech
and free assembly, then hastened to safeguard target shooting?

As a hunter, I can debate all night the benefits of the outdoor ethic
and the role hunters play in scientific wildlife conservation. As a
marksman and as an officer of an Association that promotes competitive
shooting, I can attest that marksmanship builds mental control and
self-discipline, two characteristics we need more of in this country.

But other sports build other attributes ...

Why not safeguard gymnastics to ensure an acrobatic citizenry?

How about long distance running to ensure Americans stay lean and
aerobically mean?

Why not protect weight lifting to ensure bulky voters?

Isn’t it so that sport was the furthest thing from the minds of the
Founding Fathers? They were building a country, not a country club.

Perhaps they had states’ rights in mind. That’s it. They wanted to
protect the right of states to form militias. A collective right.

If it’s a right of states, where are the cases filed by states?
Although they are few, Second Amendment claims are brought by
individuals, not states. The courts have never struck down a single
case brought by an individual citizen, because his name was not Alaska
or Alabama. Individual citizens have standing to file a Second
Amendment claim.

And if the Founding Fathers sought to guarantee a state’s right, no
one uttered a word about it. If this Second Amendment safeguarded a
collective right, it was the best kept secret of the Eighteenth
Century. No known writing from the period between 1787 and 1791 even
suggests that a single American even entertained such a notion.

Indeed, the collective rights notion is an invention of this century.
In fact, the theory is an invention of the gun prohibition movement.
Listen to how former Congressman Butler Derrick, once the sweetheart
of the anti-self-defense lobby, defines the Second Amendment,

“The Constitution says that a citizen has a right to form a
militia and to bear arms....”

These crazy so-called militia groups are a by-product of this kind of
fuzzy, bankrupt thinking by Second Amendment opponents. Citizens have
no right to form a militia. Conscientious objectors excepted,
citizens have a duty to respond when a duly constituted official
organizes a militia. With every apology to the real militia —
organized as a function of state sovereignty — like, being called up
by a governor? — and with no apologies to the Fifty First Dogbreath
Militia and other off-spring of the misguided gun ban movement — the
Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to citizens, to
people, people like you.

With a tap root in the British common law right of self-defense, the
Second Amendment is the right that prevails when, heaven forbid, all
else fails.

The Second Amendment is more than an affirmation of your right to
protect yourself and your family. The Second Amendment marks the
property line between individual liberty and state sovereignty. The
state can do all it can to assure our corporate safety, but it cannot
infringe on our right to personal safety. If it does, it is not
heeding the property line. It is trespassing.

When the Founding Fathers wrote those twenty-seven words, they were
laying the fence line between state power and citizen’s rights. Under
the Second Amendment, we are not consigned the role of spectator in
the struggle for freedom and safety. Under the Second Amendment, we
are empowered to become what we should have been all along — an
active participant with the state, a co-equal partner in the pursuit
of personal and community safety.

Is the right to bear arms one of the great human rights? No.

In this amendment, we see preserved the greatest human right. In this
amendment, we see enshrined the ultimate civil liberty — the right to
defend one’s own life — without which there are no rights.

You will hear my opponent say that the courts are hostile to this
right and, because of this hostility, this right is not a right,
people are not people, and arms could not possibly mean arms.

Yes, the courts are hostile to this right, and anyone here who values
civil liberties should not be surprised. Certain jurists have an
aversion to certain rights. It’s the Murphy’s Law of American civil
rights.

But imagine this nation if we all agreed, without exception, to sit
back and say, because of a court’s hostility to a particular right, it
is no longer a right. Then, we must all agree with a Supreme Court
which, years ago, was hostile to the civil rights provisions of the
Fourteenth Amendment. We must all agree that people of different
races should not be treated equally by their government.

From roughly the 1890s until after the Second World War, the Supreme
Court basically refused to enforce the equal protection provisions of
the Fourteenth Amendment and the voting rights provisions of the
Fifteenth — the color-blind voting rights provisions of the Fifteenth
Amendment!

Care to side with the court? Or will you side with the Founding
Fathers and the people as the final arbiters of our rights?

Second Amendment advocates are fond of pointing to Nazi Germany,
Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia as distant lessons
of tyranny that could have been resisted by an armed citizenry. This
has been a century of holocausts, from the Warsaw ghetto to the
killing fields of Rwanda.

Of course, that sort of thing can never happen here. Is it
intellectual cowardice that prevents us from merely asking the
question about the desirability of the state having a monopoly of
force? Do you become “right wing” by merely posing the question?

Put another way, how can conservative Republicans claim the Second
Amendment as their own?

There’s always been a teeter-totter relationship between the
individual’s delicate rights and the state’s overwhelming power.
Historically, hasn’t it been liberal Democrats who have wanted to
place the fulcrum in the position that favors the individual?

Let me share the words of a great American with you:

“Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any
government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right
of the citizen to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that
firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite
rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But
the right of the citizen to bear arms is just one more
safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in
America, but which historically has proved to be always
possible.”

I have not quoted Newt Gingrich here. You didn’t hear this from Rush
Limbaugh. I have quoted the exemplar of postwar American liberalism,
former Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

What was Hubert Humphrey thinking about when he wrote those words? He
knew then — and we know today — that we do not have tyranny in this
country. The courts are open. Voting booths are open. The press,
while it might sometimes appear jobless, is still on the job. We may
not like the taxes, but we certainly endorsed the taxes, if only by
default. We have taxation with representation, and in Humphrey’s day
and our own, Americans who don’t like the taxation work within the
system to change the representation.

So, do we save the Second Amendment for a rainy day when a despot
reigns? Or do we use the Second Amendment for the tiny tyrannies that
claim so many lives? The tyranny of criminal attack. When you are
alone. When all the speaking out on social policies doesn’t matter.
When all the voting and all the praying don’t matter, as you catch a
glint of your reflection on the blade of a knife wielded by an
attacker. And at the scene of this crime scene, as with most others,
there are no police on hand. Just the victim and the predator. Just
you, and your attacker.

Here’s a story about one tiny tyranny that befell a woman in Virginia
a couple of years ago. At three a.m., Rayna Ross slept with her
infant child in her garden apartment. It was fitful slumber. In the
past several weeks, her former lover had attacked her, held her
against her will, threatened her with a weapon.

Authorities held him but later released him. He proceeded to stalk
her and, as he did, he wrote to her. His letters grew increasingly
dark, foreshadowing what experts would later call a murder-suicide
that was inevitable.

Local authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. They couldn’t
encircle the woman with security guards. They couldn’t post police
officers, one at the front door, another on the patio. They couldn’t
follow her to and from work.

They could just issue an arrest warrant.

Because the state of Virginia employs an instantaneous computer
background check for gun purchases, Miss Ross’s gun purchase was
immediate. That’s the system my organization is passing in state
after state — it’s fast, fair and effective. That’s the system that
the Brady waiting period evolves into in a couple of years.

Miss Ross’s gun purchase was not just immediate, it was also
fortunate. Because her attacker burst through the patio door and went
after her with a huge knife that one summer morning, at three in the
morning — just three days after she purchased her gun.

Had she been forced to wait, she and her child would be dead now.

Another tiny tyranny — but, maybe, not so tiny to the victim.

Philip Russell Coleman worked past midnight in a Shreveport,
Louisiana, liquor store and feared criminal attack. He purchased a
gun under the Brady five-day waiting period. But unlike Rayna Ross,
Philip Coleman will never speak out again. He will never vote. He
will never plead the Fifth. Coleman’s gun purchase was approved
August 15, 1995 — three days after he was shot and killed at the
liquor store in the dead of night.

Another tiny tyranny, but, maybe, not so tiny to the victim.

Monroe, North Carolina. 1957. The Monroe chapter of the NAACP feared
intimidation and violent attack at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bravely, the Monroe NAACP members continued their role in the civil
rights struggle. They exercised their civil liberties. Their voting
rights. Their right to speak out. To assemble. To associate with
one another. But the Ku Klux Klan kept pushing — and they were
armed, and they were illegally using those arms. In retaliation for a
resistance effort organized by the chapter’s vice president, the Klan
set about driving through black neighborhoods and firing guns at
homes. They targeted particularly the home of the chapter vice
president, Dr. Albert E. Perry.

So, the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP decided to
exercise another of their civil liberties. The right to keep and bear
arms. In 1957, sixty members of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP
affiliated with the National Rifle Association of America and received
firearms training. Many posted themselves at the home of Dr. Perry,
their vice president.

When the Klan motored in for another night of tyranny, they came face
to face with the Second Amendment.

In the words of one participant,

“An armed motorcade attacked Dr. Perry’s house which is
situated on the outskirts of the colored community. We shot
it out with the Klan and repelled their attack and the Klan
didn’t have any more stomach for this type of fight. They
stopped raiding our community.”

The terrorists failed, because one right prevailed.

You will hear my opponent offer grim statistics and lay them at the
foot of the Second Amendment. I, too, can offer those same statistics
as gruesome proof of the failure of reliance on laws that do nothing
more than restrict the rights of law-abiding people — from Rayna Ross
to the Monroe chapter of the NAACP — and do nothing to disarm
criminals or thwart criminal attack. Vast numbers of criminologists
have studied gun control schemes and found them ineffective. They’re
in your library.

While your checking the criminologists, check the constitutional law
scholars. The overwhelming scholarship in the law journals comes down
on the individual rights view.

Listen to Yale’s own Akil Amar, Professor of Law:

“The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to `the
people’ not `the states.’ ... `[T]he people’ at the core of
the Second Amendment are the same `people’ at the heart of the
Preamble and the First Amendment, namely citizens.”

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm from nearby Bentley College has
this to say:

“The argument that today’s National Guardsmen, members of a
select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to
keep and bear arms has no historical foundation.”

And listen to William Van Alstyne, a contender for a Supreme Court
nomination, now Professor of Law at Duke:

“For the point to be made with respect to Congress and the
Second Amendment is that the essential claim advanced by the
NRA with respect to the Second Amendment is extremely strong
... the constructive role of the NRA today, like the role of
the ACLU in the 1920’s with respect to the First Amendment,
ought itself not to be dismissed lightly.”

We are all painfully aware of the cultural meltdown in our society
with the greatest pain being endured in the inner city. The tragedy
of crime is not only the greatest threat to our lives and property, it
is the greatest threat to our civil liberties as well. A by-product
of racism, it is also, depending on your perspective, a by-product of
either neglect or too much Great Society spending. What is
unassailable is that, beneath the inner city tragedy, lies moral decay
and hopelessness. Restrictions against Second Amendment rights won’t
restore morality, and ineffective schemes only enhance hopelessness.

If we respect the lessons taught by the tiny tyrannies in this country
— and they’re not tiny tyrannies at all, are they? — we will find
ourselves shoulder to shoulder with our Founding Fathers.

In the Second Amendment, they lit a fire of freedom. And we can read
by the light of that fire the two lessons our Founding Fathers
intended — power does not belong exclusively in the hands of the
state and self-defense is indeed the primary civil right.

Thank you.

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“I would never invade America, there is a gun behind every blade of grass.” – Isoroku Yamamoto

Bookmarking, and BUMP!