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• Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
  -- "M.T. Cicero", in a newspaper letter of 1788 touching the "militia" referred to in the Second Amendment to the Constitution....
• 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.
  -- The Constitution of the United States of America Amendment 2, 1791...
• 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....
• If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military.
  -- Harry S. Truma...
• An hour's perusal of our national charter makes it hard to understand what the argle-bargle is about.
  The First Amendment forbids infringments of the freedom of speech "except for commercials on children's television" or "unless somebody says '****' in a rap song or 'chick' on a college campus....
• In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militia
  while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms....
• Perhaps the reason the modern liberal so disdains the 2nd amendme
  and so loves the 1st, is that the 2nd protects our right to take action in defense of liberty, while the 1st protects our right to talk about it....
• You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
  -- Charles A. Beard...