“When considered in the context of prohibitions against the government, the Second Amendment reads as a clear rebuke against any attempt to restrict the citizenry’s gun ownership. As such, it is as necessary an ingredient for maintaining that tenuous balance between the citizenry and their republic as any of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, especially the right to freedom of speech, assembly, press, petition, security, and due process,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “In this way, the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights in their entirety stand as a bulwark against a police state.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Can the government require that citizens prove they need self-protection in order to carry a gun outside the home? That is the question before the U.S. Supreme Court in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, which has been asked to decide whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a gun outside the home for protection and whether government officials should be able to pick and choose which class of citizens are deemed worthy of self-protection. In filing an amicus brief in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Rutherford Institute attorneys argue that the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution must be available to all citizens and not parceled out at the whim of government bureaucrats.
Affiliate attorneys Michael J. Lockerby, Eli Evans, W. Bradley Russell, A.J. Salomone, and John Sepehri of Foley & Lardner LLP assisted in advancing the arguments in N.Y. State Rifle.
“When considered in the context of prohibitions against the government, the Second Amendment reads as a clear rebuke against any attempt to restrict the citizenry’s gun ownership. As such, it is as necessary an ingredient for maintaining that tenuous balance between the citizenry and their republic as any of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, especially the right to freedom of speech, assembly, press, petition, security, and due process,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “In this way, the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights in their entirety stand as a bulwark against a police state.”
