Quotes About The Second Amendment

“Thank God for the second amendment.”

— Jesse Petersen

“The Second Amendment is timeless for our Founders grasped that self-defense is three-fold: every free individual must protect themselves against the evil will of the man, the mob and the state.”

— Tiffany Madison

“Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud-I repeat the word FRAUD-on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“We have to fulfill what the real meaning of the Second Amendment is: reasonable access to guns for self-protection and for hunting. And there's no room in America for these semiautomatic, automatic and other kinds of weapons that are simply designed to cause mass havoc.”

— Alan Dershowitz

“I don't understand why it's controversial for law-abiding citizens protecting themselves under the Second Amendment.”

— Jerry Falwell, Jr.

“The founders also knew that every government system risks corruption, and they wanted to make sure Americans would be able to defend themselves should the nation's leaders become tyrannical. To that end, they ratified the Second Amendment, guaranteeing the right of Americans to bear arms. An armed populace is a powerful deterrent to tyrants both domestically and internationally, and we must defend this liberty as part of our common defense.”

— Ben Carson

“I'm 100 percent behind the Second Amendment. I believe it's not just a hunting right. It's a right for everyone to carry their weapons.”

— Raul Labrador

“Because the Second Amendment is an incomprehensible mess, because too many lobbyists have argued that it is an absolute protection of actions and items never considered at the time of our nation's founding, and because there is a clear state interest in protecting the lives of its citizens, the words must be removed from the Constitution.”

— Kurt Eichenwald

“The people who talk most about the need to regulate guns are also usually the same people who know the least about them. Ask these gun prohibitionists about the Second Amendment and they'll usually mention hunting or sport shooting.”

— Glenn Beck

“The Second Amendment, like all of our rights, is reliant on a moral and virtuous people. Without that, nothing else matters. Man can not rule himself if ... moral sentiment is missing.”

— Glenn Beck

“The Second Amendment does protect the right to people to possess weapons for self-defense in the home. That's what the Supreme Court said.”

— Laurence Tribe

“The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.”

— Steve Stockman

“I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment. But I think I have a First Amendment right not to be shot.”

— Michael Nutter

“I'm a defender of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.”

— Joe Manchin

“It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“The Second Amendment is the one that really protects all of our liberties that we are given by our Lord, and our God-given rights, and are protected under the Constitution.”

— Paul Broun

“Politicians need to rethink their reflexive invocations of the Second Amendment and the idea that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge.”

— David Ignatius

“We need to get some rationality on the Second Amendment. This is crazy what we allow ourselves.”

— George Takei

“I don't hate the government. I don't think the Second Amendment is being infringed upon.”

— Henry Rollins

“The Second Amendment is an integral part of the Bill of Rights.”

— Ted Cruz

“The Second Amendment only protects the people who want all the guns they can have. The rest of us, we've got no Second Amendment. What are we supposed to do?”

— Louise Slaughter

“After more than two decades of trying to destroy the firearms rights of more than 80 million law-abiding American gun owners - and statistically failing to show any impact on violent crime - the Brady 'Campaign Against Illegal Guns' is yet another crusade whose ultimate goal is to trample the Second Amendment into dust.”

— Alan Gottlieb

“[The] National Rifle Association is always arguing that the Second Amendment determines the right to bear arms. But I think it really is the people's right to bear arms in a militia. The NRA thinks it protects their right to have Teflon-coated bullets. But that's not the original understanding.”

— Robert Bork

“The National Guard fulfills the militia mentioned in the Second amendment. Citizens no longer need to protect the states or themselves.”

— Dianne Feinstein

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”

— Alex Kozinski

“Indeed, that the Second Amendment poses no barrier to strong gun laws is perhaps the most well-settled proposition in American constitutional law.”

— Erwin Griswold

“It's part of the Constitution. People have the right to bear arms. Then the restrictions of it have to be reasonable and sensible. You can't just remove that right. You've got to regulate, consistent with the Second Amendment.”

— Rudy Giuliani

“Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.”

— John Ashcroft

“A textual analysis of the Second Amendment supports an individual right to bear arms.”

— Samuel Ray Cummings

“Dr. King kept guns in his home to protect himself and his family. After firebombing and numerous death threats by racists, his application for a permit to carry a gun was denied by the 'may issue' white power structure (Democrat) in that time and place. Let the holiday that celebrates this man's life include some reflection on the importance of the Second Amendment.”

— Massad Ayoob

“Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago ... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment.”

— George Will

“Loving the Second Amendment while opposing the NRA is every bit as natural as loving Jesus while opposing Westboro Baptist Church.”

— John Fugelsang

“How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual ... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.”

— Suzanna Hupp

“When they took the Fourth Amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the Sixth Amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the Second Amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the First Amendment, and I can't say anything at all.”

— Tim Freeman

“I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States come under attack from those who either can't understand it, don't like the sound of it, or find themselves too philosophically squeamish to see why it remains the first among equals: Because it is the right we turn to when all else fails. That's why the Second Amendment is America's first freedom.”

— Charlton Heston

“All that first term, lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term,”

— Wayne LaPierre

“The Constitution, in addition to delegating certain enumerated powers to Congress, places whole areas outside the reach of Congress' regulatory authority. The First Amendment, for example, is fittingly celebrated for preventing Congress from "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion or "abridging the freedom of speech." The Second Amendment similarly appears to contain an express limitation on the government's authority.”

— Clarence Thomas

“The Second Amendment! It says you have the right to bear arms, or the right to arm bears, whatever the hell you want to do!”

— Robin Williams

“Get rid of the guns. We had the Second Amendment that said you have the right to bear arms. I haven't seen the British really coming by my house looking for it. And besides, the right to bear arms is not an absolute right anyway, as New York's Sullivan Law proves. We talk about ourselves as a violent society, and some of that is right and some of it is claptrap. But I think if you took away the guns, and I mean really take away the guns, not what Congress is doing now, you would see that violent society diminish considerably.”

— Roger Rosenblatt

“And it never, ever was interpreted that the Second Amendment meant individual's right to bear arms”

— Rosie O'Donnell

“Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention 'the people,' the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset ... The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms ... The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it 'shall not be infringed.”

— Antonin Scalia

“By calling attention to 'a well regulated militia,' 'the security of the nation,' and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms,' our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy ... The Second Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important.”

— John F. Kennedy

“I strongly support the Second Amendment and I believe the Second Amendment ought to be preserved - which means no gun control.”

— John McCain

“The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.”

— Joseph Sobran

“Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.”

— Walter E. Williams

“What we've seen in Louisiana - the breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of disaster - is exactly the kind of situation where the Second Amendment was intended to allow citizens to protect themselves.”

— Wayne LaPierre

“I intend to dedicate my remaining time as president of the NRA to ensure that the Second Amendment is safe from Al Gore and all those who threaten it.”

— Charlton Heston

“I believe we can have common sense gun safety measures consistent with the Second Amendment, and, in fact, what I have proposed is supported by 90 percent of the American people and more than 75 percent of responsible gun owners.”

— Hillary Clinton

“The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. A revolt from people who were stolen from their land or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that's what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.”

— Danny Glover