Interpretation of the 2nd Amendment

• "The evidence is over whelmingly in favor of the interpretation that the drafters of the Second amendment deliberately intended, with specific words they chose to use and with the specific way they chose to organize those words into one long sentence, to recognize the existence of both a "collective" and an "individual" right of the American citizen to keep and bear arms." - Les Adams, The Second Amendment Primer (1996)

• "The language of the Constitution cannot be interpreted safely except by reference to the common law and to British institutions as they were when the instrument was framed and adopted." Chief Justice Taft, Ex parte Grossman, 267 U. S. 87 (1925) at 107.

• "...Moreover the Oxford English Dictionary defines "regulated" among other things as "properly disciplined" and it defines "discipline" among other things as "a trained condition. ... The National Guard cannot possibly be interpreted as the whole constitutional militia encompassed by the Second Amendment; if for no other reason, the fact that guardsmen are prohibited by law (32 U.S.C. 105 [a][1]) form keeping their own military arms. Instead, these firearms are owned and annually inventoried by the Federal government and are kept in armories under lock and key." Les Adams, The Second Amendment Primer (1996) Taken from a letter from David Caplan to the author.

• "While this textual exegesis [explanation] is by no means conclusive, it suggests that "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom the rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community." - Chief Justice William Rehnquist, U.S. vs. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 (1990)

The Natural Right of Self-Defense and Bearing Arms

• "There exists a law not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right." - Cicero, Selected Political Speeches 222 (translated by M. Grant, 1969)

• "A Covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For...no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself from Death." - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 95 (1964)

• "Although difficult for modern man to fathom, it was once widely believed that life was a gift from God, that to not defend that life when offered violence was to hold God's gift in contempt, to be a coward and to breach one's duty to one's community. A sermon given in Philadelphia in 1747 unequivocally equated the failure to defend oneself with suicide: 'He that suffers his life to be taken from him by one that hath no authority for that purpose, when he might preserve it by defense, incurs the Guilt of self murder since God hath enjoined him to seek the continuance of his life, and Nature itself teaches every creature to defend itself.'" - Jeffrey R. Snyder, A Nation of Cowards (1993)

An Armed Society

• "This demise of the armed citizen meant the end of civic virtue and with it the end of the people's control over their destiny." - Stephen Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed; The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (1984)

• "Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years." - Machiavelli, On The Art Of War 30 (trans.) E. Farnsworth, (1965)

• "No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, (1776)

• "From Anglo-Saxon times, as A.V.B. Norman reports in his book The Medieval Soldier, 'the ceremony of freeing a slave included the placing in his hands of arms as a symbol of his new rank. Anglo-Saxon law forbade anyone to disarm a free man, and Henry I's laws applied this even to the man's own lord." - Les Adams, The Second Amendment Primer (1996)

• "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. ..." - Mohandas Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

The Folly of Repealing the 2nd Amendment

• "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 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 - so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator - 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 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, On Crimes and Punishment, (1764)

• "... the said Constitution be never construed to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms; ..." - Samuel Adams, Massachusetts U. S. Constitution Ratification Convention, 1788

Other Bill of Rights Quotes

• "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." - Gerald R. Ford (1976)

• "A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences." - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (1787), Papers 12:440

Infamous Quotes

• "What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

• "The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth." - William Jefferson Clinton at the University of Connecticut, 10/15/95

• "Another weapon I discovered early was the power of the printed word to sway souls to me. The newspaper was soon my gun, my flag - a thing with a soul that could mirror my own." - Benito Mussolini, "London Sunday Express", 12/8/35

• "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ... " - William Jefferson Clinton, "USA TODAY", 3/11/93, page 2A

• "Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

• "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf