Lawrence O’Donnell Airs Old Clip of Republican Chief Justice Calling the Second Amendment a ‘Fraud on the American Public’
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell turned back the clock by airing video of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger excoriating the Second Amendment.
On Monday, a shooter gunned down six people at a school in Nashville. Three of the victims were children, all nine years old.
The rampage has spawned the usual demands for gun control from Democrats and the calls to fortify schools from Republicans. During his show on Tuesday, O’Donnell stated the political divide on guns was not always so wide.
“There was a time when Republicans were no more in favor of gun rights than Democrats were,” he said. “But then Republican campaign pollsters found the sliver of the electorate that cares obsessively about guns and added them to the sliver of the electorate that cares obsessively about stopping all abortions, and added them to the electorate that hates taxes and liberals. And that became their only formula for winning elections.”
O’Donnell invoked Burger, a Republican tapped by President Richard Nixon to become chief justice in 1969. Burger served until retiring in 1986.
“Conservative Republican President Richard Nixon chose Warren Burger to be chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, knowing that Warren Burger would steer the court in a more conservative direction, which he did,” O’Donnell said. “But the one thing that Warren Burger could not abide was the fetishism about the Second Amendment that he saw beginning to develop when he was chief justice.”
The host aired a clip of Burger speaking on PBS in 1991, five years removed from his time on the highest court:
BURGER: If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment.
REPORTER: Which says?
BURGER: That a well regulated militia, being necessary for the defense of the state, that people’s rights to bear arms [shall not be infringed]. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.
Now, just look at those words. There are only three lines to that amendment. A “well regulated militia.” If the militia, which was going to be the state army, was going to be well regulated, why shouldn’t 16 and 17 and 18 or any other aged persons be regulated in the use of arms the way an automobile is regulated?
O’Donnell accused recent Republican presidents of perpetuating a more extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment.
“The Republican fraud perpetrated by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump and Republican members of the House of Representatives and Republican senators will continue to get children and teachers murdered in their classrooms by legally-purchased AR-15s because it is the Republican Party policy to make sure that America’s mass murderers are the very best-equipped mass murderers in the world,” O’Donnell said.
The full text of the amendment in question reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Many gun control advocates say that the right to bear arms is tethered to the concept of a “well regulated militia” of the sort that existed at the country’s founding, but is no more.
