Senator Barack Obama says he will respect gun owners, but campaign talk is cheap. What gun owners must know before they vote is that Obama promises to appoint a U.S. Supreme Court that will eradicate the Second Amendment from the Constitution.
On June 26, in the case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held in a split 5-4 decision that the Second Amendment secures a right to keep and bear arms for private citizens, and struck down the D.C. law that banned all handguns and readily-usable firearms, even in your own home.
That decision turned on a single vote. The four liberal justices on the Supreme Court voted against the Second Amendment and to uphold the gun ban. They wrote that the Second Amendment confers no right whatsoever on private citizens, that Americans have no personal right to own guns of any sort, and the government can confiscate or ban them at will. The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms survived by the slimmest of margins. If a single justice had voted the other way, the Second Amendment would have been erased from the Constitution forever.
Obama’s record shows his assurances to gun owners are cheap campaign talk. He has an unbroken record of voting for every anti-gun measure to come before him. He’s voted to outlaw ammunition and to allow trial lawyers to sue gun makers and dealers for the misuse of firearms by criminals. He has voted against the self-defense rights of victims of crime. He even wrote as early as 1996 that he supported a law to ban all handguns. But even if he had no anti-gun record, he has said who he would appoint to the Supreme Court and the justices he would appoint will take away our Second Amendment rights.
He has singled out one justice on the Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as his model for Supreme Court appointments. Justice Ginsburg was one of the four who voted that private citizens have no Second Amendment rights at all, and voted to uphold D.C.s handgun ban.
The next president will probably have at least three Supreme Court appointments in his first term alone. Not since Ronald Reagan has any president had that many vacancies in a single term. If Barack Obama becomes president, appointing three more Ginsburgs to the Supreme Court could doom the Second Amendment. He has repeated his Supreme Court preference multiple times. In debates and in speeches, Obama has said time and time again that he will appoint liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court and to our lower federal courts as well.
Just this week, a radio interview from 2001 surfaced, in which Obama said that he believes the Supreme Court should go further and start redistributing income to achieve what he calls “economic justice.” A judge who is willing to take your money and give it to someone else won’t hesitate to take your guns. Every supporter of the Second Amendment has a duty to protect our right to keep and bear arms. Our gun rights are a precious part of our American heritage and one of the reasons we continue as a free nation.
Our Founding Fathers considered that right so sacred that they wrote it in the Bill of Rights next to our freedoms of speech and religion. Every gun owner owes it to the next generation to protect our right to keep and bear arms. This right isn’t ours to lose, it belongs to our children and grandchildren. Barack Obama promises a Supreme Court made up of justices who have demonstrated in writing their intention to eliminate the Second Amendment from the Constitution. America’s gun owners must stop him at the polls on November 4.
History shows that once a nation’s citizens lose the right to keep and bear arms, they never get it back. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” On Tuesday, use your vote wisely; vote to protect the Second Amendment, vote for John McCain. *Sandy Froman is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the former president of the National Rifle Association of America. The views expressed are her own.
By Sandy Froman
