[The claim of an individual’s right to own firearms] is “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.” –  the late Warren Burger, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

 

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      • Why? Now he’ll never know I called him a dumbass who can’t even read 27 words without making mistakes.

        • A Simple Tip that you’d think ‘Justices’ would be able to grasp .. The US Constitution BLATANTLY says to whom each of its Rights, Powers, and Proscriptions refer.

          *When the Constitution means the Federal Government, it Directly Says So.

          *When the Constitution means The States, it Directly Says So.

          *When the Constitution means the The People, .. it Directly Says So.

          Now, Pop Quiz — To Whom Does the RIGHT of The Second Amendment Refer? — The States? The People? No One?

          Here Endeth The Lesson.

      • Yes Sir you are right. I agree with you 200%. That man must have been ate up with the DUMB ASS & he was chief justice of the Supreme Court. He must have been a democrat.

      • Hate to break it to you but a gay man can make a fine boyscout leader. A pedophile or any sex offender doesn’t. But gay doesn’t mean rapist so you’re clearly making a foolish claim.

        Now as far as catholic priests go… I’ll leave that for a catholic to answer.

        More importantly that justice was a moron.

  3. He’s lucky he’s not alive today I would have been highly offended by that and demanded a trigger warning as well as various laws to stifle his free speech for it. I have a right to be free of offense afterall.

    • Hes just a product and reflection of that generation of Republicans that wanted very strict gun control: Richard Nixon (total handgun ban), Ronald Reagan (FOPA 86′), George Bush Sr. (total assault weapon ban), James Brady (Brady Bill), etc…. the irony is that the Democrats wanted in on the “ban wagon” and passed NFA ’68 and AWB ’94. After the political shellacking they took for for THEIR gun control push, Republicans learned to stay in the closet and not bring up gun control. But the Republicans were more than ready to sell us out in the name of “common sense” after Sandy Hook, before their brains grew back.

        • “We do have a tendency to blame on Democrats things rightfully blamed on governments.”

          The ‘worker bees’ of government in the US are 90 percent Democrat in political bias.

          It’s all the micro-decisions made by those little people that bias the US government Statist…

      • Even with the new machine gun ban FOPA is a very good law, it turned back many of the onerous sections of the GCA. As the new machine gun ban was an attempt to bitter pill the law, Reagan offered to veto it, but the NRA felt that the good out weighed the negatives and that they would be able to attack the machine gun ban in the courts.

  5. I wholeheartedly agree. The fact that it is not totally enforced and states like Maryland can claim the United States Constitution applies to Federal powers but not State powers is one of the biggest frauds in American history. Which other Amendments do not limit State powers, I wonder.

    • You’re referring to the doctrine of incorporation, which means subjecting the stated to restrictions in the Bill of Rights.
      Originally, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government. Incorporation was debated and rejected by the Framers at the time. Since passage of the 14th amendment in 1868, the Supreme Court has practiced a policy of “selective incorporation.”

      As of today, the 3rd, 7th, 9th, and 10th amendments have not been incorporated. The 5th, 6th, and 8th are only partially incorporated. Even the 2nd amendment was incorporated basically just five minutes ago with the McDonald v. Chicago case of 2010.

      Now, just because a right has not been incorporated does not mean you don’t have it at the state level. State constitutions and legislation may offer similar protections.

      • Libertarians make the same argument. The Bill of Rights does not apply to the states. That is why they make the case that racial discrimination in private business is okay. They used to use Arizona senator Berry Goldwater as their backup. Because he while he disagree with racial discrimination in the south it was the state’s business how they conducted themselves against the black citizenry there. Whereas he in Arizona had desegregated the Arizona National Guard at least 2 years prior to when President Truman desegregated the United States Federal military.

        If you go back and read reason magazine the Libertarian Flagship publication and their back issues in the 1970s and 80s you’ll see that they totally supported Senator goldwater’s position on Southern race discrimination. Now Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine is trying to rewrite that history by claiming that Goldwater was somehow racist. Libertarians need to make up their minds.

        Libertarians make the argument that it’s okay for racial discrimination in private business practices. But they say the exact opposite when it comes to sexual discrimination in private business practices, ie. An insurance company cannot charge more for homosexuals because their private conduct it increases the chances of them catching HIV AIDS.

        What does this have to do with guns? Well if it’s okay to discriminate in private business practices based on race then a white gun store owner doesn’t have to sell to a black customer.

        Which is why I would like to go back to a time before 1968 when black people used to be able to purchase their firearms through mail order. With direct delivery to their homes. Its exactly how some people used to be able to purchase a Thompson submachine gun. delivered to their home. No background check required.

        But now Libertarians support doing away with the US Postal Service. And leave only private companies like Facebook Google Spotify Twitter and others to deliver information and products such as gun parts and accessories to your home. Which now some of those private companies now refuse to do.

        • “Libertarians” are not a monolithic group any more than Republicans and Democrats.

          There are “right” Libertarians, “left” Libertarians, and “small-l libertarians” who despise “big-L” Libertarians. There are anarchist libertarians (usually small-l). There are Christian libertarians – even Christian anarchists, which I view as a contradiction in terms, but nonetheless they exist.

          I tend to agree that government should not regulate small business (sole proprietorships). And I also think there shouldn’t be such things as “corporations” which are basically chartered by the government and allowed to operate as private individuals, which they are not. Most of the problems caused by business are caused by corporations with too much influence on government (and vice versa.)

          In my view, a white gun owner should not have to sell to a black customer, or vice versa. The same applies to any other form of transaction. But at the same time, the government should not be able to prohibit sales of firearms over the mails or the Internet. Any form of government control over firearms is “infringing” in my view.

          These things can’t be discussed rationally outside the context of the political theory they are embedded in. You either believe in a state which theoretically has the right to control everything as a result of its “monopoly on the use of violence” or you don’t. The Founders thought they could split the difference – and now see where we are. Burger is an example of what you get.

  6. Like I’ve said many times before, arms control is a tool used by the ruling class to control those they rule over. The former is often quite happy to make soothing noises about “classless societies” and “the consent of the governed” as long as that hard distinction is ultimately preserved where the rubber meets the road. But we should never expect the ruling class to like the idea of the right to bear arms. We should expect them to be horrified by it, and that has no more significance than the opinions of a king on the merits of monarchy.

  7. The Second Amendment either grants a government power or recognizes an individual right, there’s no third option. Anyone who claims that a constitutionally granted government power was stuck prominently a ‘Bill of Rights’ that otherwise places limits on government power in the other 9/10ths of the amendments is either brazenly dishonest or incredibly stupid.

    • Stupidity and dishonesty are not mutually exclusive. I’m going with ‘incredibly stupid in his brazen dishonesty’.

    • These have the cumulative effect of there being no such thing as a legal gun control law anywhere within the boundaries of the US. First, Congress was never specifically granted the power to regulate them. Second, the preamble to the bill of rights specifically makes it known they are specifically banned from doing so. Third, the 14th applies the 2nd to the states.

      Article. I. Section. 1. *All legislative Powers herein granted* shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

      Preamble to the Bill of Rights:

      The conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, *in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers*, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added.

      Amendment XIV

      Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. *No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States*; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

  8. I don’t really understand the militia argument, or the ‘collective right’ argument.

    So if the 2A isn’t an individual right, then it would apply only to State or Federal Armies. So then why say ‘The Right of The People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed’?

    And it doesn’t make (logical) sense to declare that the government shall never be prohibited from ensuring that the members of its Armies are armed. Uh, I believe elsewhere in the Constitution, it explicitly states that the Government shall provide arm to it’s military.

    I think my mistake is believing that logical arguments win in the court of law, politics, or public opinion.

    • Also if it were a federal power it would be in the Constitution not the Bill of Rights. You could make the argument that the militia clause is like the 10th Amendment and prohibits the federal government from interfering with state militias, but that would make the National Guard unconstitutional. And you’d still have to ignore the whole ‘right of the people… shall not be infringed’ part. Unless you’ve got the same definition of ‘the people’ as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is probably the case here.

      • There’s another problem with the whole “State Militias” argument. What if a State says “everybody between 17 and 60 is in the militia?” My state does. Then what if that same state decides that members of said militia are to procure their own weapons privately? Certainly there’s nothing historical that would suggest such a power was prohibited to the states. Such an interpretation would suggest that Federal gun control would infringe on the right of such states to arm their militias as they saw fit, and be therefore unconstitutional.

        Nah, the whole “collective right” canard is a feeble pseudo-intellectual coverup for “no right”, and always has been.

    • The argument comes from treating “the People” as a plural/collective, not as separate individuals. Thus there is a collective right to keep and bear arms in order to provide for the militia, but not an individual right to keep and bear arms. The argument falters, however, as Justice Scalia noted, because this interpretation requires that the right be a state, not an individual right; yet the Constitution is quite clear when it refers to either the states or to the individual citizenry. The former is “the States,” and the latter is “the People,” i.e., citizens in their individual sovereign capacity. Historically it breaks down as well since many if not most of the militias of the day were local units that could be called up by the sate, but generally kept to their own areas, acting as a local Indian defense and criminal police force.

      • Except “the right” refers to the Subjects Rights, Subjects Arms from the English Bill of Rights of 1688, which applied to the founding fathers as they were Englishmen. That is not in the slightest bit a collective right. When people say “the car” or “the door”, there is a pre-existing car or door being referred to. Scalia points this out in Heller.

    • “We must really scare the shit out of these people…”

      Good.

      Who was it who said “It is better to be feared than loved.”?

      I’m perfectly good with being feared.

      It just *might* keep the Leftists from thinking they can pull off some evil shit…

  11. here’s the abstract of the 4 page paper Burger authored.

    https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=160176

    and it’s laughably awful. guess this is why Burger was not considered an intellectual on the court.

    “A huge national defense establishment has assumed the role of the militia of 200 years ago. Americans have a right to defend their homes, and nothing should undermine this right; nor does anyone question that the Constitution protects the right of hunters to own and keep sporting guns for hunting anymore than anyone would challenge the right to own and keep fishing rods and other equipment for fishing. Neither does anyone question the right of citizens to keep and own an automobile. Yet there is no strong interest by the citizenry in questioning the power of the State to regulate the purchase or the transfer of such a vehicle and the right to license the vehicle and the driver with reasonable standards. It is even more desirable for the State to have reasonable regulations for the ownership and use of a firearm in an effort to stop mindless homicidal carnage.”

    • Oh Warren…. cars require public roads maintained by the government. It makes sense to tax the users of those public roads a-la registration fees for public use of a vehicle. But vehicle ownership is completely unregulated. Vehicle training is required for people who operate those vehicles on public roads in order to reduce accidents, because cars are so much more lethal than firearms…. as a matter of fact, 2 times more people are ACCIDENTALLY killed by cars than INTENTIONALLY killed by firearms. And ALL vehicle laws exclusively pertain to public USE of a vehicle, not private ownership.

  12. If you watch the video its obvious the good judge doesn’t care about the intent of the framers who wrote the 2nd amendment. He just wants to focus on the words and give them his own meaning. In addition he states in that “I would have never wrote the 2nd amendment”. Again he doesn’t seem to give a damn about the motivations behind the amendment or its text.
    A couple of other things I find significant about Burger: He was appointed by Nixon – who despite being a Republican hated firearms. He is also described as a “had conservative leanings, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a variety of transformative and controversial decisions on abortion, capital punishment, religious establishment, and school desegregation during his tenure.”

    • To say that deceased Justice Burger did not care about the intent of the Founders on the Second Amendment is an understatement.

      All these people who only want government agents to have firearms — would they continue to cheer as said government agents began sending them to “reeducation camps”?

  13. The NRA must have a time machine, because the prevailing view by every legal scholar, jurist, all the case law, and every single citizen for the first 150 years of our country must’ve been duped by special interest groups into believing in said “fraud.”

    • Technically, however, the issue did not arise in federal jurisprudence until Miller v. U.S. Since the 2d had not been incorporated against the states at those times, those cases are not dispositive of the issue presented under the Federal Constitution. Indeed, the majority of the cases of the day did not even consider the US Constitution, only the individual state constitution. They are persuasive simply because many states modeled their own gun rights protections from the federal model.

  14. This is why elections are so important. Asshats like this end on the court for life and control too much.

  15. Nothing much to add. Already stated this dead fool was appointed by(1st) Eisenhower and (for SCOTUS)Nixon. We really don’t what someone like Kavanaugh will do until he’s in. The leftard’s NEVER flip…

    • Yes and no. Kavanaugh currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. That court is especially important because that’s where the big cases litigated against the federal government end up, unless or until they move on to the Supreme Court. It’s often regarded as a recruiting court for future SC nominees. In fact, three of the current SC justices (Thomas, Roberts, and Ginsburg) came from the D.C. Appeals court.

      Kavanaugh is in his prime SC court nomination age range. He had to have expected on 2011, as most everyone else did, that Obama would win re-election (most modern day presidents who seek re-election, win re-election). Just as reasonable would be to expect Hillary to win in 2016.

      Yet, in 2011, the D.C. Appeals court’s majority opinion upheld Washington, D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic firearms and its gun registration law. Kavanaugh dissented on both items, claiming the court could rely only on “text, history and tradition.” Why would he do that, unless he was honestly judging the case, if he expected his only route to the SC would have to be through Obama or Hillary? That lengthy dissent would disqualify him in their eyes.

      We won’t know for certain until he’s seated and voting on 2A cases, of course, and appointees can thoroughly disappointment sometimes (*Ahem* Souter. *Ahem!* Roberts). Still, Kavanaugh’s looking good so far; certainly better than Mr. Wishy Washy “Please love me! I’m even more traitorous and maverick-y than McCain!” Justice Kennedy.

    • The GOP has done a much better job picking judges since the early 1980’s. Look at Thomas, scalia, roberts, alito and hundreds of lower court judges. The one major screw up was souter a rotten POS. That was the HW bush taking the word from people in NH who knew souter, particularly warren rudman who was the AG in NH. Rudman knew he would go liberal and lied to Bush.

      An opinion article by The Wall Street Journal some ten years after the Souter nomination called Souter a “liberal jurist” and said that Rudman took “pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House Chief of Staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle.”[28] Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had “suspected all along” that Souter would not “overturn activist liberal precedents

  16. Frauds like Burger and Warren are the main reason why freedom suffered in the last half of the 20th century.

    • “Frauds like Burger and Warren are the main reason why freedom suffered in the last half of the 20th century.”

      This,Quoted for truth.

  17. I could say the same thing about the claim that the government restricting access to guns actually saves lives.

    • They either have really incriminating pictures of Roberts in his wifes hose or they paid him a whole lotta money (or both) to get him to roll on obamacare.

  19. “nor does anyone question that the Constitution protects the right of hunters to own and keep sporting guns for hunting” Where does the word “hunting” appear in the Second Amendment or in the Constitution?

  20. So much fail in Warren’s writings. I agree with Ike: putting Warren on the Supreme Court was the biggest damn fool mistake he ever made.

  21. Actually, even without the “Bill of Rights”, the right to bear arms would still be valid as our RIGHTS are pre-ordained and come from our Creator. Unlike every other Constitution formulated by mankind, our Constitution states that our RIGHTS are “inviolate”, absolute, and cannot be restricted as they are not “permissions from government” but are natural human rights, endowed by our Creator.
    EVERY statute , law or ruling regarding any aspect of the Constitution or Bill of Rights, is invalid on its face. PERIOD!

    • …..Which brings me to another point, property Tax; Is it moral and/or Constitutional to force a Land Deed holding property owner to pay taxes by threat of Prison and/or forfeiture of said land?
      IMO once you pay something off you shouldn’t be forced to keep paying extortion, er, I mean taxes on it.

  22. Warren Burger was a fraud. One of the frauds who believes the Constitution is a “living document” meaning that they can change the meaning anytime they feel like it.

  23. Yep….and this is why we need to vote for every republican we can in November…..Only a Republican Senate can confirm judges and justices for Trump, and if the democrats take the House, the Senate Democrats will use that to pressure Republican Never Trumpers and squishes to not confirm any more of Trump’s nominees…since, they will say, Trump is under impeachment.

  24. Supreme court judge. Thinks he’s all that and a can of beans. His job was to take direction from the founding fathers documents. Nowhere does it say he’s allowed to judge them.

  25. Burger was a snake and an intellectual fraud.

    The Chief Justice or, if he is not in the majority, the senior-serving justice, assigns the justice who authors the majority opinion. There are many examples of the self-aggrandizing Burger switching sides so that he could assign himself to write for the majority. This was an unpopular move. I see a bit of Burger in Roberts, don’t you?

    The only good thing that anyone can say about Burger is that he wasn’t Earl Warren.

    • I lost all faith in Roberts after the Obamacare fiasco where he rewrote the law from the bench to make it less illegal. Still was illegal in my non-lawyer opinion, just sayin’. He has yet to redeem himself in my humble view.

      During that time, I was certain someone somewhere had pictures of Roberts in compromising circumstances with little kids. What else could explain his actions. Then I remembered, he’s a lawyer; without conscience or moral scruples. Able to argue effectively on either side of any case.

      • If Robert’s ACA decision was at least rational, it would be easier to swallow.

        As the late John Belushi was known to say –

        “But, Nooooooooooooooooooooo!”

        He had to tap-dance his way to that decision with utterly laughable ‘logic’…

  26. Pretty difficult to get me worked up about what a dead dinosaur had to say, or believed. We’ve come a long way since he ruled the court and with the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh should be on even more firm ground provided Roberts cab keep from becoming the covetted “swing vote”. I expect to always have to stand up for my God-given rights but it would be nice to think that the new court might have our backs on all of them.

    One aside about SCOTUS: Over the past couple of decades, the Court has given Congress cover- allowed them to totally shirk their duties and provide them an awful lot of time to further enrich themselves rather than do the work they were sent to DC to accomplish- either create new legislation or get rid of the bad and mundane. It’s my hope that justices like Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will return the Court to its priciple duty of reviewing legislation and law and not in writing their own. If there is one thing we all should insist on as voting American citizens, it is that Congress must take back its job.

      • On a rope?

        For if we’re talking about having 4 justices to the left of her, putting her squarely in the middle…

        (I can imagine Kagan in the middle, but never Sotomayor or Ginsberg)

  27. I spitteth in your direction Warren Buger, a curse of a thousand Gypsies be upon you

    • It is worthy of being feared. Getting more militarized also. But, so are our citizens. Should be interesting one of these days.

  29. How the hell did this Crayola munching window licking failed abortion ever make it to the Supreme Court? I thought there was a literacy test to get in there or something. So much fail in one statement proving the man cannot comprehend simple English when reading it straight from the document he swore to uphold.

  30. How about a follow up from his predecessor, FDR (D) appointed and Democrat Senate confirmed KKK member and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black?

  34. I would love for him, and each current member of Congress to answer this question …. Under which Article of the Constitution authorizes Congress pass so called gun control laws?

    • Since the second Amendment says: “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.”, and the People are us, not the government, We get to decide.

      If only the government can appoint the militia, then it would not say “the people”, it would say the State, or the Nation or some other wording.

      The founding fathers knew that someday there’d be government assholes trying to control who gets what to defend themselves. They just knew it and it has come to pass more than once.

  36. Here is more on this.

    http://ethicsalarms.com/2018/03/25/morning-ethics-warm-up-3-25-18-march-for-our-lives-hangover-edition/

    “Warren Burger said that the Second Amendment was about militias!” Yes, a lawyer actually tried this one on me—a liberal lawyer, whose tribe detested Burger (who was a pretty weak justice.) A lawyer, who knows that an opinion by a retired Chief Justice that has since been definitively rebuked by an actual Supreme Court decision, resorts to a statement that he wouldn’t use in a brief or oral argument, because he knows it is worthless authority.

    …

    The anti-gun mob really has nothing but bad statistics, mislabeling of semi-automatics as “assault weapons” and “automatic weapons,” dubious polls, fear-mongering, euphemisms for Second Amendment repeal (“sensible gun reforms”), “Think of the children!”, “Do something!”, insults, and most irritating of all, insisting that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what the Supreme Court said it means, which is not merely sort-of like, but exactly like anti-gay marriage advocates insisting that marriage is between a man and a women no matter what SCOTUS says.

    – Jack Marshall

  37. If the justice felt that gun ownership was a fraud, then every ruling he made regarding guns should be under suspicion. Just as justice Stephens felt the 2A should be repealed, any rulings made should be reviewed.

  38. First of all, have any of you ever seen this supposed quote ever before this article? Nope, this is just another example of propaganda by the fake news left. Designed to stur things up.

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