Chief Warren Burger And The Second Amendment.

"The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires."

Chief Justice Warren Burger,
December 16, 1991.

BTW, Burger was a ultra conservative too. So he did support gun rights, etc. He just thought that Republicans were damaging their cause with ignorance like that.

Yeah, Burger was really the first original intent judge, i.e., ultra, ultra conservative. He was open-minded in some ways. He supported rights for the mentally ill in our justice system. And he filed a concurrent opinion supporting Roe v. Wade in 1973, along with his St. Paul College of Law alumni Harry Blackmun. Then in 1986 he had his famous split with Harry Blackmun.

Actually Harry Blackmun was solidly conservative too. I'd still call him a conservative. People of the time would remember, like Sandra Day O'Connor, he was heavily involved in Republican politics. Actually, in 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. I'll bet a lot of people didn't know that.

 

The Second Amendment is a pernicious artifact from a time when we were a confederation of states, had no standing army, and the standard infantry weapon had a firing rate of four times a minute and a range of a hundred yards. Now we garrison a global empire, and the Second Amendment's sole raison d'etre; to maintain "a well regulated militia", has been a moot point for over 100 years. More Americans have been shot to death in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history; more than 1.5 million. To attempt to justify such carnage based upon reverence for a legislative fossil that should have been repealed when high-button shoes and buggy whips went out of fashion is as idiotic as it is obscene. The U.S. Constitution has been amended 27 times. It's well past time we amended it again and repealed the Second Amendment.