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NEWT GINGRICH HAS EMBRACED “SECOND AMENDMENT REMEDIES,” REPEATEDLY |
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Washington, DC-Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced today via Twitter and Facebook that he will be a Republican Party candidate for president in the 2012 elections. While the media has scrutinized many aspects of Gingrich s political background and advocacy, one area that has been chronically ignored is his radical position on the Second Amendment.
Gingrich has been a featured speaker at the past two national conventions of the National Rifle Association (NRA). There he has been called on to provide the intellectual imprimatur for the organization s beliefs about the Constitution. Specifically, Gingrich has affirmed-repeatedly-the NRA position that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals-divorced from any type of service in a state-directed Militia-to take violent action against our government when they believe it has become tyrannical. In their amicus brief in the landmark Second Amendment case of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the NRA dismissed with the argument that the Framers were contemplating only empowering the [states ] Militia as a check on the national government, arguing instead that the Second Amendment refers to the utility of an armed population in preventing government tyranny. Gingrich picked up on these points in his speech before the 2011 NRA Convention in Pittsburgh, stating:
He even seemed to embrace radical sovereign citizen ideology, stating, We are the only country in human history which says you personally-every single person in this room -God has given each one of you personally rights which make you sovereign. You as a citizen are sovereign. You loan power to the government. The government does not loan power to you. At his speech before the 2010 NRA Convention in Charlotte, Gingrich suggested that federal laws governing gun ownership (including laws in the District of Columbia) are a legitimate pretext for violent revolution:
As the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) has stated in the past, such insurrectionist ideology is fundamentally anti-democratic-a philosophy of might makes right where one person, one vote becomes one gun, one vote. It is not only diametrically opposed to the basic American principle of political equality, but also a continuing threat to the safety of America s elected officials and public servants, as CSGV s Insurrectionism Timeline makes clear. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence seeks to secure freedom from gun violence through research, strategic engagement and effective policy advocacy. |