-By Warner Todd Huston
On Fox News Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer spoke of his dissenting decisions in the several Second Amendment cases that he heard as a Justice. He told host Chris Wallace that he thought that James Madison only included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights as a sop to the states and Breyer insisted that historians agreed. In essence, Breyer was saying that Madison was not interested in an individual’s right to gun ownership and self-protection and for that reason his dissenting opinions against that individual right accorded well with what the founder’s thought on the issue.
But Breyer’s assumption that a citizen’s right to bear arms is not sacrosanct and his following contention that the founders would agree seems to ignore much of the history of the era not to mention the precedents in law and the historical record upon which the founders relied to define their political ideas — including Madison.
Of course, it is a bit ridiculous to take one lone founder’s words and assume that it represents the opinion of all of them. It is quite easy, after all, to find quotes from any particular founder that in no way reflected even a minority opinion of the day. For instance, Thomas Jefferson once advocated that all laws be dumped every few decades so that the next generation could start over with their own ideas unencumbered by past generations. Even Madison thought that idea was absurd. Hamilton found that many of his most dearly held financial ideas left his fellows cold. John Adams thought that we should call the president “your majesty,” an idea that earned him much derision. And Poor Richard himself, Benjamin Franklin, once proposed that each galaxy had it’s own “God” that ruled in his own sphere meaning that there were infinite gods for infinite galaxies. Not every idea the founders had were gems, to be sure.
Still, Madison spoke with most of his contemporaries, not outside them, when he considered the meaning of the Second Amendment.
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Supreme Court Justice Breyer: Founders Were For Restricting Guns… Why Breyer is Wrong”
Most Americans would imagine that if a homeowner is accosted in her own home by an outsider, the homeowner would be justified in arming herself. In fact, most Americans would think it a right… seeing as how there’s that whole Second Amendment and all.
This week we have two prominent examples proving that liberals are ignoramuses about the Constitution and U.S. history. One incident wholly misunderstood by the left was uttered by the redoubtable Sarah Palin and the other by Christine O’Donnell.
The world is rejoicing that the miners trapped for over a month in the bowels of a mountain in Chile are finally rescued. As the rescue was ongoing President Barack Obama said of the worried families, “the tears they shed after so much time apart expressed not only their own relief, not only their own joy, but the joy of people everywhere.” Touching sentiments. These miners have to be joyful about one other thing: that they aren’t miners trapped in an American mine during Obama’s presidency. If they had been, they’d still be down there unable to wipe the tears from their loved one’s faces.
So you are a busy federal agency with lots and lots to do. You have roads to build, bridges to reinforce, and infrastructure to shore up, but there is something gnawing at your paper pushing soul. It’s those darn street signs in New York City and others. So, like a good, jackbooted government automaton, you storm down to that offending city and
The Constitution of the United States of America. Journalist
We send our students to college to learn what they need to know to become good American citizens. From this knowledge we hope that they will realize useful, maybe even successful, lives. Perhaps they’ll even gain personal improvement through introspection from it all. At least that’s what we used to think. Apparently, these days we send kids to college to be trained to hate the U.S.A. and at least in the case of Brooklyn College to learn that today Muslims are treated as badly as the African Americans or the Japanese internees of our past.
As the left falls all over itself to claim that building the Ground Zero Mega-Mosque is the
What sort of nation have we become when it takes monumental efforts by a kid to get a school administration to “allow” them all to recite the Pledge of Allegiance?
A University of Illinois instructor of the school’s Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought course
Democrats might be right. It’s obvious that Americans have become a stupid people. Our schools have disgorged students who have fallen to the bottom of the barrel in literacy, math and science scores, late-night comedians have no lack for citizens on the street that have no cue about law or history, and as voters…. well, as voters we’ve been stupid enough to elect people like James Traficant, John Edwards, Robert “KKK” Byrd, “Benedict” Arlen Specter, Pete Stark, or for that matter Jimmy Carter and Barack Hussein Obama. We need help and what better entity than government to rescue us? So, we need some new rules so that Americans can be better controlled.
The United States of America used to be a fearsome power but one with a soft touch. Peoples of the world looked to this great nation as that “shining city on a hill” and came here by the millions to become the next new American citizen. Producing its greatness were great men and in memory of those great men landmarks, and worthy institutions were named after them by a proud and thankful people.
A group called
America is fast coming to a crossroads from which there will be no return if we take the wrong path. Do we take the road that leads away from America and toward a Euro-esque way of governing? Do we cast aside our American character and bury our great nation in a grave of socialist-styled authority? Do we damn our progeny to a failed superstate that violate every tenet of our original ideals?
Leftists love to purposefully misconstrue what sort of government conservatives want. Certainly whenever some new big government boondoggle erupts in the typical corruption and waste that is government, conservatives rail against the misappropriation of powers that such boondoggles invariably mean. But when government isn’t doing something they want it to do and conservatives kvetch with equal vitriol, the first attack left-wingers charge them with is hypocrisy. The left’s taunt, however, is a willful misread of what it is that conservatives are saying in their critique of government.
Mick Dumke of the Chicago Reader had an
A Virginia-based publisher has decided that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and other founding books are likely offensive and they want their readers to understand that these old documents are no longer valid ways of thinking. And so the publisher, 
