Informative Speech For Gun Ownership :: essays research papers

Certainly one of the foreman guarantees of freedom under any g all overnment, no matter how popular and respected, is the the right way of the citizen to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be real carefully used and that definite rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. exactly the right of the citizen to bear arms is just one much confession team against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible. -Hubert Humphrey, 1960 My background is probably atypical for a somewhat high-profile supporter of the right to keep and bear arms. I am black and grew up in Manhattans East Harlem, far remove from the great American gun culture of rural, white America. Although my voting patterns develop become somewhat more conservative in recent years, I remain in my heart of hearts a 1960s Humphrey democrat concerned with the plight of those most vulnerable in American society-minorities, t he poor, the elderly, and single women-groups whose day-to-day realities are often overlooked in our public insurance policy debates, people whose lives too often go unnoticed by our intellectually timid chattering classes. This is happening in the public debate over the right to bear arms. For the nations elites, the flake Amendment has become the Rodney Dangerfield of the circular of Rights, constantly attacked by editorial writers, police chiefs seeking scapegoats, demagoging politicians, and most recently even by Rosie ODonnell, no less. It is threatened by expedient legislative efforts, even when sponsors acknowledge their proposed legislation would have little clashing on crime and violence. Professional champions of civil rights and civil liberties have been disinclined to defend the underlying principle of the right to arms. Even the conservative defense has been timid and often inept, tied less, one suspects, to abiding principle and more to the dynamics of contempo rary Republican politics. Thus a right honest-to-goodness than the Republic, one that the drafters of two constitutional amendments the Second and the Fourteenth intended to protect, and a right whose critical importance has been painfully revealed by twentieth-century history, is left receptive by the lawyers, writers, and scholars we routinely expect to defend other constitutional rights. Instead, the Second Amendments intellectual as well as political defense has been left in the unlikely hands of the National Rifle acquaintance (NRA). And although the NRA deserves considerably better than the demonized reputation it has acquired, it should not be the sole or even principal voice in defense of a major constitutional provision.