Justice Breyer’s remarks on guns revisionist thinking
By the Daily News
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is an ideologue, a judicial activist who rules by his own political and personal philosophy, rather than the rule of law and what our founding fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights more than 200 years ago.The left-leaning justice recently made remarks that further the suspicion that has been held for years - he doesn’t rule in regard to the Constitution, but rather a far-left political philosophy.
On Sunday, Breyer, a Bill Clinton appointee, said the founding fathers never intended guns to go unregulated.
Breyer said history stands with the dissenters in the court’s decision to overturn the Washington, D.C., handgun ban in 2008 case “D.C. v. Heller.”
Language in the Heller decision,however, acknowledged the constitutionality of some restrictions on guns.
Breyer wrote the dissent and was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. He said historians would side with him in the case because they have concluded that founding father James Madison was more worried that the Constitution might not be ratified than he was about granting individuals the right to bear arms.
Mr. Breyer, you couldn’t be more wrong. Breyer even went on to ask: “What is the scope of the right to keep and bear arms? Machine guns, torpedoes? Handguns?”
There are limitations on the right to keep and bear arms just as their are limitations on freedom of speech and of the press, as well as other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
Madison, along with other patriot founders of our nation had something very compelling reasons for protecting the right to keep and bear arms.
Perhaps Mr. Breyer should look at the murder rate in the nation’s capital - many were killed because of the handgun ban. The city of Chicago and several other large cities that ban handguns also see very high murder rates, many people would likely still be alive today if they had the right to possess a handgun in those cities, as the founders intended, to defend themselves.
Mr. Breyer seems to be engaged in an exercise of revisionist history.
It is unlikely that the former 13 colonies would have ratified the Constitution without the inclusion of the Bill of Rights, which included the Second Amendment.
The 13 former colonies had recently secured their independence after a protracted and bloody struggle against British tyranny.
A laundry list of grievances against the British crown and Parliament as outlined in the Declaration of Independence is insightful.
Given a genuine concern that they might exchange one government that ran roughshod over their rights for another, the insistence on the inclusion of the Bill of Rights as a condition of ratification is hardly surprising.
Americans of that day were well aware of the important role of an armed citizenry at Lexington and Concord at the dawn of the revolution.
Moreover, Americans relied on their guns to protect their homes and settlements during the French and Indian wars.
During the revolution, settlers had to depend on their guns for protection against marauding bands of Indians incited by the British.
Perhaps Breyer should read the account of the siege of Fort Boonesborough in our own state of Kentucky.
But perhaps not, since Breyer seems more partial to history of the revisionist variety.
http://bgdailynews.com/articles/2010/12/14/opinion/our_opinion/opinion1.txt
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