In his very concise brilliance, Aristotle points out, in this statement, that citizens need to be reminded of the great treasures we own in common, especially our National Parks and our sacred natural places, where natural selection, over millions of years, has developed many species (e.g. caribou, bison) to the level of amazing excellence, but where man's greed so quickly soils and spoils and where human sport hunting removed the fittest of every species, ushering in devolution, in place of evolution. Aristotle lived in the Golden Age of Greece whose public art and architecture, inspirations to all citizens, still surpass the greatest of modern artists..

This statement by Coolidge is certainly applicable, above all, to our nation's war spending (for past, present, and future wars, maintenance of nuclear weapons that are still a grave danger to humankind). The statement merely points the great need for firm regulations and auditing of war spending right now, with a Defense Department that hasn't passed an audit in over a decade. War spending is, far and away, the most wasteful way possible for simulating a sluggish economy. It certainly cured our Great Depression and ushered in three decades of prosperity before Reaganomics created leaks in the ship of state, leading into red ink until Clinton balanced the budget and began paying down the national debt. Equal spending on health, education, and infrastructure, in the absence of a war, would accomplish several times as much right now..

It is a fine statement about any attempts to curtail private spending, but that is the least of our dangers at this time. Along with quotations of Smith's "unseen hand," this one is subject to misapplication as though it were a recommendation against taxes or regulations to prevent the self-destructive binges of the titans of our private sector, who have repeatedly destroyed the financial solvency of us all on their way down. Those interpretations of Smith are simply erroneous and self-serving. Smith himself would never have agreed.

So now we know what one Virginian (who was not a party to the vote by the Continental Congress) said to his fellow Virginians when they were debating whether Virginia should vote to support adoption of the Bill of Rights. All right, but it proves absolutely nothing, except that he knew how to talk.

Attorney Dennis Hannigan is absolutely right, and his understanding of the Second Amendment was shared by all of the various U.S. federal courts that ruled on the subject for decades before Scalia, in his Second Amendment fundamentalism, read a literalism into the language not intended by our founding fathers who ratified the Second Amendment, winning won over his paleolithic colleages and the suggestable middlers to his bizarre point of view.

As always, Black's Law Dictionary hits the nail squarely on the head. T.Ray, JD

Thank you for quoting this highly esteemed federal judge. His statement is sublime and true but not perfect. Those to whom freedom is precious also must be prepared to fight to preserve the limitations upon the power of government to protect from interference our rights to speak, write, assemble, pray or refrain from praying, and confer with legal counsel when threatened with conviction for crimes of which we are accused. We must never forget that our founding fathers and the framers of our Constitution were profoundly committed to protect our ability to live our lives as we chose so long as we refrain from invading the rights of others, pay our taxes, and accept reasonable limitations on our conduct in order to make possible life within civilized society.

Government wasn't the problem, but what Ronald Reagan did with it was a HUGE PROBLEM. He sold our great weapons to Iran shortly after its leaders had taught their people to shout "Death to America." Worse yet, he took the ill gotten cash and gave it to the "Contras" (they who are against) who were nothing but the very same killers who had protected the Anastasio Samosa, the dictator that the people had overthrown in Nicaragua, who then used it to slaughter the Nicaraguan people whom they had not to kill before. Samosa had bombed the cities of his own country in his efforts to hold onto power. Reagan would have been impeached and removed from office for his "Iran Contra" crimes, but for the Special Counsel, a Republican retired judge, who concluded that Reagan simply could not remember the events of that hideous sequence. By the way, Reagan ran against Carter by pointing out the 7% inflation rate during Carter's administration, but 8 years later, Reagan left the USA with a 15% inflation rate! He also doubled the deficit AND the national debt. And he wasn't even trying to cure a recession, which might have excused it.

The virtue of this statement is that is shows the indissoluble link between the (believed) necessity of a militia and the fact that no militia can possibly exist without citizens having weapons of their own at the ready. Justice Scalia's fantasy that the "original intent" of the 2nd Amendment is to make the right to bear arms independent of its relationship to the militia ignores the obvious original intent of the word "guns," which was specificly the flintlock musket or similar weapons which required a significant pause after each shot is fired to prepare the weapon to fire again. Today's military attack weapons, in the hands of citizens, would enable the sole rebel to eliminate an entire militia. In as much as the original militia has been totally absorbed in to the US Defense Department, the 2nd Amendment is now devoid of any practical utility whatsoever and should be, by amendment, removed from the Bill of Rights in order to avoid engendering the sense that every man should be an army of one. Our citizens are dying daily as our US weapons flood into Mexico (whose laws otherwise tightly restrict private ownership of guns) and are brought back north of the border by the infamous drug gangs that we have thus armed. Every home in which there is an adolescent with a psychiatric disorder (and there are millions) is placing a son or daughter in grave danger of suicide daily, and every home in which there are toddlers and other young children risks tragic deaths of children every day.Private ownership of firearms must be abolished immediately.

A person with a scholarly reputation has a duty to conduct debate without indulging in Argumentum ad Homenem, i.e. attempting to crush one's opponent by means of name calling ("Foolish liberals"). Dershowitz is fully aware that U.S. federal courts held for decades that "the right to keep and bear arms" is in our Bill of Rights solely because of the historical context of militias being essential to our defense, which they have not been for more than a century. Holding this right to be an individual right is totally without historical justification and is the result of the doctrinaire slant held by the majority of our present Supreme Court justices. Remember that this is the same court that, contrary to the clear words of the Constitution, snatched the responsibility of Florida's management of its own presidential election out of the control of our Florida Supreme Court and forced both the state and the nation to accept a conclusion which was actually contradictory to the actual votes of Florida voters, as a complete recount by the State of Florida of its own counties' polling records would have certainly demonstrated. This debate won't be over until it is over. Meanwhile, gun owners and dealers are accepting no responsibility for flooding Mexico with the guns that are used to ensure victory by the drug lords, and no responsibility for the scores of young children who die because their fathers left loaded guns in easily accessible bureau drawers.

Nofziger hasn't got a clue to either what the Constitution says and does or about who is really benefiting from our 'nanny state.' The truth is that it has been set up by conservatives congresses to further protect and enrich to wealthy who fund their legislative campaigns. Very few members of either house of congress get elected with support from poor and working people, because they cannot fund the necessary war chest. Election publicity should be totally publicly financed, as the only way to escape from the policy of "you must pay to play."

Professor Lawrence Tribe's statement is bold, courageous, profound, and true. He has identified precisely the kind of "big government" that our Founding Fathers and the framers of our Constitution warned us to avoid and attempted to protect us from in the Constitutional structure the provided, including our precious bill of rights. For Congress to attempt to delegate to the President its constitutional duty to decide when the USA will be at war is little better than treason.

It is great, and this is obvious, if you understand that he means that, as citizens who do believe, in general, that people should keep the laws, most of which really are there for very good reasons and purposes, then you, yourself, should keep them as well. Remember that this great judge was a champion of liberty, not an excuser of coercion!