Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch says new Justice Department figures support longtime GOP claims that the best way to fight violence with guns is not to outlaw the guns, but to prosecute criminals. Data released Wednesday showed that as federal prosecution of gun crimes increased 68 percent from three years ago under the Bush administration, violent crimes dropped 21 percent. "Our law enforcement's tough-on-crime approach parallels what I have always advocated: protect the rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms and and strictly enforce our gun laws," Hatch said. "Because of the stepped-up prosecutions, there...

Testimony of Eugene Volokh on the Second Amendment, Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Sept. 23, 1998. reprinted as A Right of the People, California Political Review, Nov./Dec. 1998, p. 23. Prof. Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School * I. Text of the Amendment and Related Contemporaneous Provisions II. Calls for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms from State Ratification Conventions III. "The Right of the People" in Other Bill of Rights Provisions IV. Some Other Contemporaneous Constitutional Provisions With a Similar Grammatical Structure V. 18th- and 19th-Century Commentary A. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) B. St....