In a joint announcement, leaders of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) today called the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right “A typically preposterous opinion from a court that has the worst track record in the nation for overturned decisions.”
“The ultra-liberal Ninth Circuit has a reputation for being the most overturned appeals court in the country,” said SAF Founder Alan Gottlieb. “Not only does the ruling run counter to extensive research supporting the Fifth Circuit’s decision last year that confirmed the individual right to keep and bear arms, it defies logic and a mountain of historic scholarship. Clearly, the Second Amendment protects an individual right. The overwhelming majority of American citizens believe that interpretation, and perhaps the time has come for the Supreme Court to finally take up this issue.”
“This is a good example of the type of ruling that comes out of the Ninth Circuit,” CCRKBA Executive Director Joe Waldron concurred. “Recall that this is the same court that ruled the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional earlier this year. This ruling even relies on material from Michael Bellesiles, the anti-gun historian whose research has been so discredited that he was forced to resign from Emory University.”
The very first footnote in Judge Reinhardt’s opinion refers to research by the debunked university professor, whose anti-gun book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, has been revealed as a monumental fraud, thus placing in question all of Bellesile’s research as it relates to firearms civil rights.
Gottlieb noted that Judge Reinhardt’s opinion appears to be written as much to debate last year’s landmark ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court, as it is to justify California’s continued effort to destroy a constitutional right by legislative whim and judicial fiat.
“To simply read Judge Reinhardt’s strained dissertation on the meaning of the phrase ‘to keep and bear arms’ is to watch a man struggling to define the word ‘is’,” Gottlieb observed. “It appears to me this opinion was tailored to fit a decision that had been reached before the legal research was begun.”
Added Waldron: “One again, we have an activist liberal court strenuously insisting that the term ‘the people,’ when used in the Second Amendment, means something different than when it is used in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth amendments. No wonder they rejected the Pledge of Allegiance. They have no allegiance, to the rule of law, the English language, or for that matter, common sense.”