The Right To Bear Arms

1. The Right To Bear Arms 2nd Amendment BY Ryan Roberts Josh Clark Tray Laurendeau

2. 1791 - States ratify the Second Amendment, stating that "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." May 2, 1792 - The Militia Act of 1792 clarifies the role of the militia and requires all able-bodied men ages 18 to 45 to be equipped to serve and participate in annual musters. 1871 - The NRA (National Rifle Association) is founded by two Union Veterans. 1934 - the attempted assassination of President Roosevelt, the National Firearms Act is put in place to regulate and tax machine guns. 1938 - The Federal Firearms Act reaches beyond earlier legislation to require licensing of handgun dealers and ban the sale of firearms to criminals. 1949 - The NRA establishes America's first hunter education program. 1965 - Scientist Stephanie Kwolek develops the polymer Kevlar, which revolutionizes the concept of body armor. Over 2,500 police officers' lives have been saved by Kevlar bulletproof vests.

3. 1986 - The Law Enforcement Protection Act bans the possession of "cop killer" bullets that can shoot through bulletproof armor. 1998 - The FBI-run national instant background check for all gun purchases goes into effect. 1999- Teen-agers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School, fueling a new campaign on gun control. 1999 - President Clinton announces a $15 million federal gun buyback plan 2000 - Members of the gun industry fire back at the federal government, with a lawsuit opposing a plan to give purchasing preference to manufacturers who agree to design safer guns. 2000 - Thousands of mothers and children gather in Washington, D.C. and cities across the country for the Million Mom March, a demonstration for "common sense" gun control laws 2001 - The Bush administration ends funding for the HUD gun buyback program 2008 - The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first definitive pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

4. White house press secretary James S. Brady became a symbol of courage for millions of Americans after he was shot in the head during John Hinckley’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate president Ronald Reagan in March 1981. He was reported dead by the three major television networks, but Brady fiercely clung to life and battled back from massive injuries. His left arm, and leg was paralyzed. He returned in the 1980’s to take on political wars again. James and his wife Sarah Brady created the “Brady Bill” which later passed in the mid-1991.

5. Cruikshank’s lawyers had sought to show that the indictments were flawed because neither the indictment nor section 6 of the statue mentioned race as an element of the crimes charged. William Cruickshank's and his fellow defendants pro section and conviction for the murders on Easter Sunday 1873. The supreme courts ruling on those conviction three years later would be seen as signaling a “retreat” from those same enforcements polices. Ultimately officials arrested nine men and brought them back to New Orleans for trial. Cruickshank was one of them. Cruikshank, Hadnut and Irwin were all charged on first 16 counts and excluded from the last 16.

6. Dylan Eric Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold were the high school seniors who committed the Columbine High School massacre. They killed 13 people and injured 21 others. Three people were also injured as they escaped the attack. Both Harris, 18 years old, and Klebold, 17, committed suicide at the site of the killings. Eric was born in Wichita, Kansas. The Harris family relocated often as Eric's father, Wayne Harris, was a U.S. Air Force transport pilot. Dylan was born in Lakewood, Colorado.

7. Charlton Heston was the President of the National Rifle Association during 1998 to 2003. He is most famous for his acting career; some of the movies he was in are planet of the apes and ben-dur which he won an academy award for best actor. In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1944 Heston enrolled in the United States air force. He reached the rank of staff Sergeant. At the 2000 NRA convention, he raised a rifle over his head and declared that a potential Al Gore administration would take away his Second Amendment rights "from my cold, dead hands." In announcing his resignation in 2003, he again raised a rifle over his head, repeating the five famous words of his 2000 speech. Millions knew Heston as one of America's most impassioned, authoritative advocates of Second Amendment freedom. On April 5, 2008, Charlton Heston passed away at age 84.

8. William Conant Church and George Wood Wingate established the National Rifle Association in 1871 .George Wood Wingate was an American lawyer and organizer of rifle practice. During the Civil War he served in a New York regiment. In 1867 Wingate drew up rules for systematic rifle practice by Company A, 22nd regiment, New York National Guard, of which he was then captain. The publication of these rules led to the organization of the National Rifle Association of America, of which he was first secretary and later president for 25 years. William Conant Church was an American journalist and soldier. In 1860 he became publisher of the New York Sun . He then later resigned his journalistic position on his appointment as captain in the United States Volunteers in 1862, and served for one year, receiving brevets of major and lieutenant colonel.

9. NRA Philosophy The National Rifle Association of America, or NRA, is an American non-partisan, non-profit organization which lists as its goals the protection of the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights and the promotion of firearm ownership rights as well as marksmanship, firearm safety, and the protection of hunting and self-defense in the United States. The NRA sponsors firearm safety training courses, as well as marksmanship events. The NRA is sometimes said to be the single most powerful organization in the United States. Its political activity is based on the principle that gun ownership is a civil liberty protected by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and it claims to be the oldest continuously operating civil rights organization in the United States.

10. National Firearms Act The National Firearms Act ("NFA") is an Act of Congress passed in 1934 that, in general, imposes a statutory excise tax on the manufacture and transfer of certain firearms and mandates the registration of those NFA. The purpose of the 1934 National Firearms Act was to regulate what were considered "gangster weapons" such as machine guns and hand grenades. Then U.S. Attorney General Homer S. Cummings recognized that firearms could not be banned outright under the Second Amendment, so he proposed restrictive regulation in the form of a high tax and federal registration. Originally, pistols and revolvers were to be regulated as strictly as machine guns.

11. The Brady Bill The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was an Act of the United States Congress that, for the first time, instituted federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the United States. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 30, 1993, and went into effect on February 28, 1994. The Brady Act requires that background checks be conducted on individuals before a firearm may be purchased from a federally licensed dealer, manufacturer or importer - unless an exception applies. If there are no additional state restrictions, a firearm may be transferred to an individual upon approval by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) maintained by the FBI.

12. The Militia Act The Militia Act of 1862 was enacted by the United States Congress in 1862 during the American Civil War to draft 300,000 eligible soldiers into the Union Armies. It also allowed African Americans to join the Union Army. While praised by many abolitionists and black-rights activists as a first step toward equality, it stipulated that the newly recruited black soldiers primarily be used for manual labor, not combat. Although black soldiers proved themselves as reputable soldiers, discrimination in pay and other areas remained widespread. According to the Militia Act of 1862, soldiers of African descent were to receive $10 a month, plus a clothing allowance of $3.50. Many regiments struggled for equal pay, some refusing any money until June 15, 1864, when Congress vacated that portion of the Militia Act and granted equal pay for all black soldiers.

13. The Gun Control Act The Gun Control Act of 1968, is a federal law in the United States that broadly regulates the firearms industry and firearms owners. It primarily focuses on regulating interstate commerce in firearms by generally prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers and importers.

14. The Brady Campaign The Brady Campaign is to Prevent Gun Violence is a non-profit organizations in the United States. The mission statement of the Brady Campaign is "to enact and enforce sensible gun laws, regulations, and public policies through grassroots activism, electing public officials who support gun laws, and increasing public awareness of gun violence." James Brady and Sarah Brady have been influential in the movement since at least the mid-80s. Sarah Brady replaced Pete Shields as chair in 1989. The Brady Campaign emerged from Handgun Control, Inc., originally the National Council to Control Handguns. The Brady Campaign was the chief supporter of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, known as the "Brady Bill" .

15. United States V. Cruikshank United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). This was the first case in which the Supreme Court had the opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment. The Court recognized that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was a right which existed prior to the Constitution when it stated that such a right. The Court held, however, that because the right to keep and bear arms existed independent of the Constitution, and the Second Amendment guaranteed only that the right shall not be infringed by Congress, the federal government had no power to punish a violation of the right by a private individual; rather, citizens had "to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow-citizens" of their right to keep and bear arms to the police power of the state.

16. Presser V. Illinois Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886). Although the Supreme Court affirmed the holding in Cruikshank that the Second Amendment, standing alone, applied only to action by the federal government, it nonetheless found the states without power to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms.Presser, moreover, plainly suggested that the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment and thus that a state cannot forbid individuals to keep and bear arms. The statute under which Presser was convicted did not forbid individuals to keep and bear arms but rather forbade "bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law . . . ." As the Court had already held that the substantive right to keep and bear arms was not infringed by the Illinois statute since that statue did not prohibit the keeping and bearing of arms but rather prohibited military-like exercises by armed men, the Court concluded that it did not need address the question of whether the state law violated the Second Amendment

17. Miller V. Texas Miller v. Texas, 153 U.S. 535 (1894) Miller challenged a Texas statute on the bearing of pistols as violative of the Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court then turned to the claim that the Texas statute violated the rights to bear arms and against warrantless searches as incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment.  the Court refused to consider Miller's contentions. the Supreme Court refused to decide the defendant's claim because its powers of adjudication were limited to the review of errors timely assigned in the trial court .

18. US V. Miller U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). This is the only case in which the Supreme Court has had the opportunity to apply the Second Amendment to a federal firearms statute. In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.Thus, for the keeping and bearing of a firearm to be constitutionally protected, the firearm should be a militia-type arm. The case also made clear that the militia consisted of "all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense" and that "when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."

19. Lewis V. United States Lewis v. United States, 445 U.S. 95 (1980). Lewis recognized -- in summarizing the holding of Miller, supra, as "the Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have 'some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia'"  Lewis was concerned only with whether the provision of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 which prohibits the possession of firearms by convicted felons violated the Second Amendment. Thus, since convicted felons historically were and are subject to the loss of numerous fundamental rights of citizenship -- including the right to vote, hold office, and serve on juries.  the Court concluded that laws prohibiting the possession of firearms by a convicted felon "are neither based upon constitutionally suspect criteria, nor do they trench upon any constitutionally protected liberties."

20. District of Columbia V. Heller For the first time in seventy years, the Court heard a case regarding the central meaning of the Second Amendment and its relation to gun control laws. After the District of Columbia passed legislation barring the registration of handguns, requiring licenses for all pistols, and mandating that all legal firearms must be kept unloaded and disassembled or trigger locked, a group of private gun-owners brought suit claiming the laws violated their Second Amendment right to bear arms. The federal trial court in Washington D.C. said that the Second Amendment applies only to militias, such as the National Guard, and not to private gun ownership. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit disagreed, voting two to one that the Second Amendment does in fact protect private gun owners. In a 5-4 decision, the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that firearm for traditionally lawful purposes.

21. Sources www.firearmsandliberty.com Had all the Court cases that delt with the and amendment the only thing it lacked was the recent court case. www.oyez.com Had the Recent court case DC vs Heller www.usconstitution.com Had information about the history of the second amendment and info about how it is affecting us now. Current Biography yearbook 1991 Had information about James Brady and the Brady Bill Losing the vote in Reese and Cruikshank By Robert M. Goldman Had Information about Cruikshank and his court case.