"The recent effort to find a new meaning for the Second Amendment comes from the failure of appeals to other sources as a warrant for the omnipresence of guns of all types in private hands. Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, as a matter of social policy. Mere common law or statute may yield to common sense and specific cultural needs. That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere. Those advocates love to quote Sanford Levinson, who compares the admitted “social costs” of adhering to gun rights with the social costs of observing the First Amendment. We have to put up with all kinds of bad talk in the name of free talk. So we must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to. Well, it doesn’t."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Pulitzer Prize winnersAcademics from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesBiographers from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Garry_Wills
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Garry Wills
3 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Garry Wills →
Related Quotes
"So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are g…"
"The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. …"
"For him delicious flavors dwell In books as in old Muscatel."
"And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-la…"
"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her…"
"Americans have always been especially prone to regard all things as resulting from the free choice of a free will. Pr…"
"Democracy is clearly most appropriate for countries which enjoy an economic surplus and least appropriate for countri…"
"Here, for the last time together, appeared a triumvirate of old men, relics of a golden age, who still towered like g…"
"The hunter catches a dreadful prey, the seaman steers his ship into an unspeakable harbor, the plowman sows and reaps…"
"You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege …"