Jamie Raskin Claims Republicans Are Reading Second Amendment Wrong: ‘What We’re Getting … is Just Repetition of Dogma’
Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) believes the Republicans are getting the Second Amendment completely wrong.
Speaking with Floyd Abrams on the Wednesday edition of his podcast Speaking Freely, Raskin detailed his journey with the assault weapons ban that passed the House last Friday.
The conversation with Abrams, the father of Mediaite founder Dan Abrams, took place right before Friday’s successful vote.
“We’re hoping that this will be, you know, one of the final things that we do before we break for the August recess,” Raskin said. “I mean, we’ve been treated to these bloody spectacles of mass shootings and massacres of school children, grocery shoppers, people in churches, people in synagogues, we need to act, we need to take it seriously.”
Raskin blamed the slow process on Republicans who, in his eyes, struggle to understand the Second Amendment.
“What we’re getting from our colleagues across the aisle is just repetition of dogmas about the Second Amendment that are refuted, um, by the text of the Constitution,” Raskin proclaimed. “They get up and they say, you know, ‘Raskin just wants to repeal the Second Amendment.’ I don’t want them to repeal the Second Amendment. I want them to read the Second Amendment.”
He continued, “I want them to read Justice (Antonin) Scalia’s opinion in the Heller decision, which says that the Second Amendment accepts reasonable gun safety regulation in pursuit of the public safety.”
Scalia, in his 2008 Supreme Court decision for the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, said the rights of the Second Amendment were not unlimited, “the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
“Just read the bills,” Raskin pleaded. “But the NRA thrives off of the dogma that you — they can’t allow one bit of regulation, no matter how reasonable otherwise, you know, everybody’s guns are gonna be confiscated. It’s absolute BS and nonsense.”
Listen above via Floyd Abrams Speaking Freely.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
