Why the Second Amendment? ... by Newt Gingrich

Wayne LaPierre for leading this organization in such an effective way and I'm always glad to have a chance to come back and to be with you I want to talk about the Second Amendment in a historic context and I want to start by telling about yesterday I was in Philadelphia and I was being given the Lincoln award by the Union League club which had been founded in 1862 during the Civil War and it got me to thinking about Lincoln who went to Philadelphia in from Sydney in February of 1861 on his way to being inaugurated and he went to Independence Hall and he gave a speech which is really quite remarkable was sort of off the cuff and he talked about the fact that the Declaration of Independence was at the heart of everything that he believed that he felt that the founding fathers had captured certain truths about how humans could govern themselves now remember Lincoln had been born very poor he had about a year and a half of education he educated himself he rose through hard work and persistence and he lived at a time when virtually every government in the world was either a monarchy or a dictator or an emperor and he really cherished the idea that everyday normal people could lead a full life could be ambitious and could end up being president States or the head of a company that their property was theirs not the politicians to steal that they lived under the rule of law not under the rule of bureaucrats and he saw the Declaration of Independence as the centerpiece and it's a really remarkable small speech and it reminded me of what I think is the most important choice we will make in 2012 and that is a choice about whether we are that didn't work at there okay it's a question of whether we're going to remain a nation that believes that our rights come from our Creator remember our first founding document says we hold these truths to be self-evident very important concept they didn't say we hold this ideology we hold this philosophy we hold this political platform these were people trying to get at what they thought was the truth about human nature the truth about whether or not you have rights and what did they say those truths were first that we're all created equal and they meant equality before the law not equality of outcome but equality of opportunity they said second that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights among which are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness now why does that matter this is what American exceptionalism is all about it's not that we're bigger stronger richer we are the only country in human history which says you personally every single person in this room God has given each one of you personally rights which make you sovereign you as a citizen or sovereign you loan power to the government the government does not loan power to you and that's why I think Constitution begins We the People of the United States doesn't begin we the lawyers we the judges we the bureaucrats we the politicians we the people now you might ask so what is this historic backdrop for the Second Amendment and for the right to bear arms I would argue it means everything notice they said these rights are unalienable now when you get to the Bill of Rights the Second Amendment begins at a very interesting way it talks about the inherent right to bear arms it doesn't say the Constitution gives you the right it says the right to bear arms will not be abridged which implies that the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution believe that your right to bear arms came from your creator and was unalienable it did not come from the government now you might say why did they think this and I want to recommend to you it's a fascinating story in history if you go back and you look at 236 years ago this month the British Army set out from Boston to crush the rebellion tension had been building for a number of years and the Americans were being very uppity and the British Empire was the richest most powerful Empire in the world and David Hackett Fischer wrote a tremendous book called Paul Revere's ride in which he fishes a great historian and he describes the setting that led to Paul Revere's ride and what happened after he rode out to warn the colonists and he points out in his book that the British Army knew how to crush peasant rebellions they crushed rebellions in Ireland they crushed rebellions in Scotland they crushed rebellions in Wales that crushed rebellions in rural England and so the professional soldiers who were marching out that day they they knew what they were doing they're going to encounter a bunch of rabble they were going to scatter them they're gonna seize their weapons they're going to imprison their leaders and it would all be over and then they ran into this problem they didn't have any peasants to fight and they didn't have any rabble to fight they had free standing Americans who had been training as a militia and who were prepared to fight the British Army toe-to-toe and by the end of the day the British Army was running back to Boston suffering substantial casualties and in a state of shock now the founding fathers knew this history they had lived this history and they knew that if they had not had the right to bear arms they would have been crushed that day they then engaged they issue a declaration of independence and on July 9th 1776 General George Washington on Bowling Green in Manhattan has it read to the Continental Army and that declaration of eminence defies the most powerful Empire in the world and assert the rights I just described you now this is an army that is going to get beaten very badly gets beaten in September in Brooklyn it gets beaten in Manhattan it gets beaten to White Plains and gets beaten at the Palisades it gets driven across New Jersey by December of 1776 six months five months after the Declaration is announced all these happy-go-lucky people who thought it was going to be easy were gone and they were down they shrank from 30,000 to 2,500 men those 2,500 men were on the edge of collapse and Washington proposed the most daring possible strategy he said why don't we cross the river in the ice during the snowstorm at night March 9 miles surprised a professional German unit defeat them decisively and re-established the morale revolution every single one of his generals said to him this is too hard we can't do this in Washington who had been fighting as early as eighteen or nineteen years of age and was very seasoned that had been through some very dangerous moments had once had two horses shot out from under him and four bullet holes in his coat during the French and Indian Wars in one day Washington said to them well you know if we don't win some place this army is going to desert when the army deserts and another week or two we will have lost the war when we lose the war everybody in this room is going to be hung so we have nothing to lose it's a little bit like the New Hampshire slogan live free or die I always remind people it's not live free or whimper live free or hire a lobbyist so that night they cross the river now Washington was a very very shrewd person he knew that people are moved as much by words as they are by deeds and so he had recruited Thomas Paine who had written a great pamphlet common sense which was the best explanation of the Declaration of Independence and which had been very widely read in the colonies and he recruited pain and pain wrote a pamphlet called the crisis which begins these are the times that try men's souls and the fact last year bill fortunate I wrote a novel called the to try men's souls which is about this crossing so as the troops are getting on the ship that night and they're going over in rowboats Washington as the officer is reading the opening chapter that talks about summer soldiers will have deserted but that if you stand firm all eternity willow you gratitude for having stood up for freedom so here's this Hardy band of 2,500 one-third of them do not have boots they're marching with their feet wrapped in burlap in the ice and snow and leaving a trail of blood they cross the river at night they then discovered to their surprise they have to cross two ravines we have to take the cannon down one side up the other side in the ice during a snowstorm and they're running four hours late four hours late if you wargame this you play it out as a board game at home the Americans get annihilated because they arrive after dawn and the Brent professional German soldiers killer however there was one other factor they're being pushed forward by an enormous wind coming out of the north with an enormous snowstorm and so they're marching south and the professional German soldiers conclude that no European army could be out in this kind of weather and so they don't post their guards and it's not that they're sloppy it's not that they're stupid they made a totally reasonable calculation if they were fighting Europeans now they forgot that in America many of you who are deer hunters will understand this Americans often go hunting in the weirdest possible weather so so for all these American soldiers this was kind of like normal it was cold it was miserable but it was normal they surprised the Germans at the cost of one American they capture 800 professional soldiers they run like crazy for the river to get across again before the British Army can catch them they've won a great victory within two weeks 15,000 volunteers show up Washington takes the new forces drives the British out of northern New Jersey and the Revolutionary War has been saved now it doesn't end Washington is in the field don't you remember this when you were campaigning next year and you get tired and you start saying oh gee this is too hard Washington was in the field for eight years he spent one week at Mount Vernon in eight years that was the price of the freedom you have that night because they really were down to the end this the password that night was victory or death and they meant it now these are the people who wrote in the right to bear arms and I just want to say and I don't want to offend anybody here who's a hunter the right to bear arms is not about hunting it's not about target practice the right to bear arms is a political right designed to safeguard freedom so that no government can take away from you the rights which God has given you and it was written by people who had spent their lifetime fighting the greatest empire in the world and they knew that if they had not had the right to bear arms they would have been enslaved and they did not want us to be enslaved and that is why they guaranteed us the right to protect ourselves it is a political right of the deepest importance to the survival of freedom in America Kalista I believe in the importance of American exceptionalism so much that this evening in Washington we're premiering a new movie a city upon a hill which shows how American exceptionalism came to be and this summer I'll have a book out called a nation like no other which talks about American exceptionalism and puts it in its correct historic context and this fall Quest is doing a children's book for first and second graders called sweet land of liberty in which Ellis the elephant introduces young kids to American history and gets them to understand as many of our schools unfortunately no longer do that this is in fact a remarkable country of great exceptionalism worthy of patriotic support and worthy of affection and love now let me show you the good news in the bad news the good news is the National Rifle Association all of you members all of your friends have done such a great job that virtually no left-wing politician is left who believes they can pass legislation that significantly will weaken the right to bear arms that's the good news the bad news is they didn't give up they are now developing a stealth strategy in which they combine anti gun judges with anti-gun international treaties in an effort to find a way to get the treaties to limit the right to bear arms so the judges will then interpret that the treaties are more important than the American Constitution and they will then try to strip us of our rights by judicial Fiat and this new stealth strategy I think is very very important that we understand it we confront it and we defeat it decisively and the two key places to defeat it are the presidency and the US Senate you know on a worldwide basis you understand why the right to bear arms has no great popularity if you were Castro Chavez Ahmed Energy Kim Jong Il would you feel comfortable if your people had the right to bear arms so when you look at all the dictatorships in the UN who are cheerfully willing to strip us of our rights you have to be especially a militant about making sure you have an American president who insists on our rights without regard to world opinion you have to make sure you have a secretary of state who understands the Second Amendment and supports it and you have to make sure you have senators who will not approve judges who are willing to strip us of our constitutional rights and so all of these things come to bear now let me say about foreign policy for just one second I believe we should have one I believe it should be an American foreign policy I believe that it should not be an Arab League foreign policy it should not be a United Nations foreign policy it should not be a will our friends like this foreign policy it should represent the Constitution of the United States in its efforts to help get anti-gun international treaties and its efforts to appoint anti-gun judges in its efforts to avoid prosecuting gun criminals but taking away the rights of innocent citizens in its total mismanagement of the sting efforts in New Mexico in every possible way the Obama administration is the most consistently anti-gun an anti Second Amendment administration we have ever seen and we need to understand that going into this now I want to point out to you that there are things a president can do on the first day this is not one of those geo take 12 years to change things presidents can issue executive orders and I want you to just imagine on the very first day the executive orders can really change the direction of government within a framework as long as it's within the law you can really reorganize things so imagine on the very first day that between the inaugural address and the legislative luncheon there was a one-hour break imagine that the new President signed a series of executive orders during that out of that one-hour orders which had already been posted on the Internet in October before the election orders which already existed and technically correct form written by veterans of the Reagan and Bush White House's orders which people already understood and supported so I'll just give you a handful one or two are not gun related but you'll see why they're useful imagine that the very first executive order simply abolished every White House's are as of that minute now imagine that that you created for executive orders that related directly to the Second Amendment first you issued as of that day an absolute requirement for the border to be completely and decisively controlled within 90 days in a verifiable and miserable way and candidly when people tell you we don't have the resources my answer is take half the bureaucrats and homeland security move them from Washington to the border and you'll be able to just line them up second an executive order that directs the Justice Department to enforce the principles that were so successful in Richmond with operation exile and focus on those felons who use guns so that the criminals are prosecuted but the innocent are protected and you'll see a dramatic drop in crime and they see that the right to bear arms has nothing to do with the right to be a criminal and if you compare the experience of Richmond with operation exa with the current catastrophe in Philadelphia where they have a judge who is anti-gun who refuses to enforce the gun rules for let's the criminals off well advocating that we somehow magically get rid of guns in Philadelphia but doesn't want to get rid of the criminals and just look at the the two patterns the current administration favors the Philadelphia model which is a disaster and leads to high homicide rates we favor the Richmond model which has historically proven to lock up the criminals and protect the innocent and do it in exactly the right way imagine executive order which as of that day instructs the State Department to actively overtly fight against any effort to control the right to bear arms internationally and to actively reach out in every country in the world to work with pro-second amendment groups to ensure that every human being on the planet understands they have the right to self-government their rights come from God and they have the right to protect themselves against tyranny and dictatorship I don't just want to be defensive and talk about the American right to bear arms the declaration independence is not a defensive document the Declaration of Penance says all are created equal the Declaration of Penance describes truths for the planet now the founding fathers were clear they didn't want us running around the planet trying to impose it but they sure went around talking about it and they sure were willing to say to dictatorships you know you're a dictatorship and they didn't kid about it and they understood that dictatorships had no moral standing in March 1983 when Ronald Reagan went to Florida get to give his very famous speech about the Soviet Union he said we must not have moral equivalency we should not compare an evil empire to a freely elected democratic self-governing Society with the rule of law and people when the elites were shocked at the term evil empire but in the Soviet Union Natanz Sharansky who at that time was a prisoner in the Soviet gulag reports and we have him in our movie on Ronald Reagan saying Pravda decided they had to attack Reagan for saying the words evil empire which meant they had to report he'd said evil empire the morning they reported it the morale of the guards and the prison collapsed the morale of the prisoners went up they began tapping in Morse code so that those prisoners who were in solitary confinement could learn that Ronald Reagan had used the term evil empire he said just the fact that a Western leader had the courage to tell the truth raised our morale and the guards never fully recovered or his Gorbachev himself said many years later we always knew it was evil we were just kind of surprised you didn't well let me tell you we need to have the same moral conviction of what we're talking about we need to go around both in our own country and around the planet and calmly and pleasantly and cheerfully say to people we believe in our declaration independence we believe the founding fathers were correct we believe there are truths that relate to humanists we believe that our rights do come from our Creator and we do not believe any government can take away our rights because they are ours and we define the government the government does not define us and that's what makes us Americans and we feel sorry when other countries have weaker rules and fewer rights and worse governments and more dangerous dictatorships we would like them to learn that there's a better way there's a way based on Rights there's a Bey way the way based on your creator having endowed you and part of that way is the right to bear arms so that you never have to be afraid of any dictatorship ever taking away your rights what you are doing is historically and morally important you should be proud of it you should tell your friends and neighbors about it you should help them learn a little bit of history and when they do you're gonna find they like you are gonna want to defend the United States of America and the rights which have made us historically unique thank you good luck and god bless you you

Channel: Randy Wakeman

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Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016