The Second Amendment does not protect “access” to a gun “without a violent criminal background check,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) claimed Tuesday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
He made this comment while trying to defend former president Joe Biden’s relentless push for more gun laws and the Democrats’ success at securing the gun controls in the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. (Breitbart News noted that Democrats secured the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act with help from Republican Sen. John Cornyn.)
Raskin decried Republican efforts to repeal or roll back gun controls that are on the books, saying, “The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld reasonable regulations to protect public safety as consistent with the Second Amendment. Meanwhile the party of states’ rights wants to preempt state and local law and force Americans to accept more dangerous weapons in their communities when they might have chosen otherwise.”
FLASHBACK — Hawkins: IL Gov. J.B. Pritzker Hasn’t Learned from Failed Universal Background Checks in NY, CA, CO
At another point in his comments Raskin said, “The Second Amendment does not protect the right to access a firearm without a violent criminal background check or the right to purchase machine guns or military-style assault weapons, even though both involve arms.”
Raskin later mocked Republicans who claim the chief point of the Second Amendment is to enable the people to be armed to repel a tyranny:
As our colleague, Representative Chip Roy, argues, the Second Amendment was “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.” And my friend Representative Lauren Boebert says that the Second Amendment has “nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.”
Ironically, in Federalist 46, Founding Father James Madison praised the fact that Americans were armed, noting that the possession of such arms gives them the ability to repel a tyranny.
Madison contended that one of the strongest checks on federal tyranny–if not the single strongest check–was an armed citizenry. He boiled down differences between Americans and their European counterparts by explaining that Americans could unite to stop a federal government intent on using military force to topple State power: disarmed Europeans had no such option.
He succinctly described this as “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, a Pulsar Night Vision pro-staffer, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly:
