The Second Amendment Quotes

“Wayne LaPierre feverishly explained that all Americans must be armed. “After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia,” he wrote. “Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.” LaPierre’s version of the hurricane mystified those who lived through it. Coney Island was unusually peaceful: there were no murders, no rapes, and no shootings that week, according to the New York City Police Department.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Repeatedly courts turned to the First Amendment. The right to speak is fundamental, but is limited or regulated under myriad circumstances. You are not entitled to commit libel, or to turn up a sound truck to eleven at three in the morning. As Justice Holmes wrote, you cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theater. The First Amendment does not enable you to stage a parade without a permit: government cannot ban your political speech, but can set rules on “time, place and manner.” Courts treat campaign contributions to lawmakers as a form of speech, but have upheld limits on the size of the gift in an effort to ward off corruption.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“The most thoughtful progressive scholars recognized that the Court was responding to a broad shift in attitudes about gun rights. For one thing, elections matter. The presidents who appointed the five justices in the majority all were themselves NRA members.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Perhaps conservative overreach will remind left and right that in our constitutional system, it is far better for fundamental questions to be resolved, if at all possible, by the push-and-pull of politics.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Siegel correctly identified Heller as the product of something more purposeful: the long campaign by the gun lobby to create a public climate that would make a Supreme Court ruling inevitable.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as twentieth century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be: What do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Over time, the “Arkansas doctrine” limiting the constitutional right to the militia became the standard interpretation.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Stanford historian Jack Rakove notes, “Understanding this aspect of the politics behind the Bill of Rights is critical to an originalist inquiry because it indicates that the final decisions about Madison’s proposals fell not to those who were most ardent for the cause of amendments but to those who doubted that such amendments were even useful, much less necessary.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Here it was, on the floor of the House: the purpose of the right of “keeping arms” was to strengthen the militia and thus ward off the specter of an army. Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting, or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“The Bill of Rights was born of a pander to a noisy interest group in a single congressional district.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Noah Webster—decades before he compiled his landmark of American usage—suggested an additional provision assuring “that Congress shall never restrain any inhabitant of America from eating and drinking, at seasonable times, or prevent his lying on his left side, in a long winter’s night, or even on his back, when he is fatigued by lying on his right.” He mischievously suggested that citizens be required to hunt, too.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Nelson Lund, opposed to gun control, notes, “Technological advances have created a sharp distinction between military weapons and the less lethal weaponry customarily kept by civilians for self-defense. This change, along with the firmly established practice of maintaining large peacetime standing armies, has created the need for legal distinctions that the Framers had no cause to consider. For them, there was no difference between military and civilian small arms.” The Framers focused on the military purpose of bearing arms, but the weapons in question were muskets, not bazookas (or drones).”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Militias were military forces drawn from the citizenry—largely the yeoman farmers who owned their own property and worked their own land. In England, and then even more so in the colonies, militia service was a universal expectation. Men from sixteen to sixty were required to join a company, and train intermittently. They were expected to own and bring their own gun. They were not allowed to have a musket; they were required to. More than a right, being armed was a duty.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“To understand the history of the Second Amendment, we start by understanding the role of those militias—and just as important, what Americans thought of them. The Second Amendment is after all a product of a particular time and place: a world with clear, plain distinctions between militias (“well regulated” and otherwise) and armies.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“The two factions long struggled for control. (Some patterns start early: Barack Obama was not the first urban politician to complain that rural Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion.”)”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“Although there is little difference in the overall crime rates between the United States and other high income countries, the homicide rate in the U.S. is seven times higher than the combined homicide rate of 22 other high-income countries.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“the country made itself stronger, more egalitarian, more effective in the world precisely during the mid-twentieth-century period when jurists were most willing to seek meaning in the spirit but not the letter of the Constitution.”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment

“through the transcript. Some colleagues, at least, found the whole exercise droll. Fisher Ames, a Federalist”
― Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment