Mar
16
Newt Talks to the NRA
At a Leadership Forum in Pittsburgh, PA, Newt Gingrich addressed members of the National Rifle Association about, not surprisingly, Second Amendment rights. (Shocker, I know!) Towards the beginning, he brought up a very important point about how the Second Amendment is worded.
“It talks about the inherent right to bear arms. It doesn’t say the Constitution gives you the right. It says the right to bear arms will not be abridged, which implies that the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution believed that your right to bear arms came from your Creator and was unalienable. It did not come from the government.”
[Note: Just so no one gets upset or confused with Newt’s paraphrase, the actually wording of the relevant part of the 2nd Amendment is “… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”]
Naturally, Newt put it all in its historical context, explaining why the Founders knew this was so important. Newt summed it up quite nicely:
“The right to bear arms is not about hunting. It’s not about target practice. The right to bear arms is a political right designed to safeguard freedom, so that no government can take away from you the rights which God has given you. And it was written by people who had spent their lifetime fighting the greatest empire in the world, and they knew that if they had not had the right to bear arms, they would have been enslaved. And they did not want us to be enslaved. And that is why they guaranteed us the right to protect ourselves. It is a political right of the deepest importance to the survival of freedom in America.”
Amen, brother! (Standing o for that one.)
