A Quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Historically, the new government had no money to pay for an army, so they relied on the state militias. And the states required men to have certain weapons and they specified in the law what weapons these people had to keep in their home so that when they were called to do service as militiamen, they would have them. That was the entire purpose of the Second Amendment.
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In my view, if the Court had properly interpreted the Second Amendment, the Court would have said that Amendment was very important when the nation was new, it gave a qualified right to keep and bear arms but it was for one purpose only, and that was the purpose of having militiamen who were able to fight to preserve the nation.
You could say that the paparazzi and the tabloids are sort of the 'assault weapons' of the First Amendment. They're ugly, a lot of people don't like them, but they're protected by the First Amendment - just as 'assault weapons' are protected by the Second Amendment.
The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.
My father had been in the military and he was a weapons specialist, so he had an affinity for weapons but also for the discipline of it. He taught us how to shoot when we were young. He opened up karate schools in the worst parts of the city, on purpose, and then he would systematically clean out a three-block radius, all of the gang-bangers and drug dealers and everybody of nefarious character.
The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.
We are having to pull money into site-level protection for elephants just to keep them alive. But there isn't enough money to go around. The people involved in protecting those elephants, like rangers on the ground, are so under-resourced. They have very few vehicles, they have very poor weapons (if any weapons at all), and they are treated as the bottom of the tree when it comes to law enforcement priority.
The President, and government, will only control the militia when a part of them is in the actual service of the federal government, else, they are independent and not under the command of the president or the government. The states would control the militia, only when called out into the service of the state, and then the governor would be commander in chief where enumerated in the respective state constitution.
It is my view that there is no sensible military use for nuclear weapons, whether "strategic" weapons, "tactical" weapons, "theatre" weapons, weapons at sea or weapons in space.
The Second Amendment does protect the right to people to possess weapons for self-defense in the home. That's what the Supreme Court said.
What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He's had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001 He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn't have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we.
There are nine countries in the world that have nuclear weapons. There are about 27,000 nuclear weapons total on the planet. The countries that have nuclear weapons deploy them ready for use and have doctrines saying that they would use them in certain circumstances.
One of the greatest concerns that I had when I became President was the vast array of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union and a few other countries, and also the great proliferation of conventional weapons, non-nuclear weapons, particularly as a tremendous burden on the economies of developing or very poor countries.
If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world.
American envoys came to see me before the crisis in Iraq and asked me to say that there were nuclear weapons in Iraq. I refused. They even told me that things would go well for Belarus in terms of investments, etc. All I had to do was to support them. I told them that I couldn't do it because I knew that there were no nuclear weapons there.
You know, people have actually changed the way they think about nuclear weapons now, post-Cold War, post-9/11. The threat of nuclear weapons is not so much Russia attacking the United States, China. It's not a state-to-state - it's obviously terrorism; it's proliferation.
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