Hatch on Guns

croak ?        THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS. 1982 Senate Judiciary report      "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." (Richard Henry Lee, Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, initiator of the Declaration of Independence, and member of the first Senate, which passed the Bill of Rights.) Samuel Adams, a handgun owner who pressed for an amendment stating that the "Constitution shall never be construed . . . to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms," would be shocked to hear that his native state today imposes a year's sentence, without probation or parole, for carrying a firearm without a police permit.. "The great object is that every man be armed . . . Everyone who is able may have a gun."(Patrick Henry, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution.) "The advantage of being armed . . . the Americans possess over the people of all other nations . . . Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several Kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, in his Federalist Paper No. 26.) The proposal finally passed the House in its present form: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.:" In this form it was submitted into the Senate, which passed it the following day. The Senate in the process indicated its intent that the right be an individual one, for private purposes, by rejecting an amendment which would have limited the keeping and bearing of arms to bearing "For the common defense". "There can be little doubt from this that when the Congress and the people spoke of a "militia", they had reference to the traditional concept of the entire populace capable of bearing arms, and not to any formal group such as what is today called the National Guard. The purpose was to create an armed citizenry...  considered essential to ward off tyranny." This content from Orrin Hatch's preface to a 1982 Senate Judiciary report on the THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.  I think this a fine stand alone source document for anyone (pro or con) thinking about whys and wherefores of the Second Amendment.  Sadly, and I do mean sadly, we have entered an era where government leaders, including the Judiciary, simply do not care what the Superstition's and Bill of Rights demand of them.  Screw them; the founding documents are still the bible of the free people we are, barely still. Which is what the Second Amendment exists. .                                                                A timely reminder from R.W. Forsythe