For Dick Heller, the battle to reclaim Second Amendment rights from the District of Columbia was over 30 years in the making, and it isn’t over yet.
“They wouldn’t let me have my gun,” he said, speaking at the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum. “I paid for it. It was mine. I live in America!”
Heller had just moved to D.C. and purchased his first gun in 1976 when the city passed its infamous gun ban, overturned in 2008 by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case in which Heller was the plaintiff.
Referring to his gun, a “.22 Buntline Special, the kind you see Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke using,” he said: “I’ve seen the Mona Lisa. I’ve seen the Statue of David. But remember, I was trained as an engineer. Now this is what I call a work of art.”
Heller decided not to register his gun during the 1976 amnesty, fearing a general gun confiscation, and tells the story of how discovering bullet holes in his townhouse motivated him to do something.
Heller and Dane von Breichenruchardt walked away from their careers and put their lives on hold for over a decade to mount a challenge to the D.C. gun ban. I’ll let him tell it himself: “We were a couple of guys living in a basement apartment, and we just got upset at the accelerating rate of government control and intrusion into our lives.”
Heller and von Breichenruchardt appeared in a second session at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum discussing the legal aspects of the case and the future litigation they will bring.
Dick Heller is a Free State Project participant. The Free State Project aims to have 20,000 or more activists move to New Hampshire to reduce the intrusiveness and oppression of government. Its annual conference, the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, showcases the state for potential participants.
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Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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Ray
Apr 03, 2009
What we need to do is give every nonfelon in DC a hand gun. Well after we insist that they go through training in its use.
Michael Hampton
Apr 03, 2009
That’ll never happen. The rulers don’t like the idea of ordinary people being armed because it presents too great a threat to them personally. Imagine if government employees actually had to worry about getting shot by ordinary citizens if they did something improper! Of course, since virtually everything they do is improper, the shootings would begin the afternoon of the inauguration and continue until D.C. was empty.
We can’t have that.
After all, how would Americans ever get along without a ruling elite in Washington to keep them in perpetual bondage, taking everything they own and giving them only a subsistence diet and a television? Americans would never be able to cope with the loss of the people who enslave them.
Gölök
Apr 06, 2009
Self defense is a damn right, damn right!
Gölök
Apr 06, 2009
Hahaha, I can imagine a murderer contemplating how much trouble he’d be with the law not complying with a gun control law, a non-capital crime (now).
Apr 08, 2009
Dick Heller and Dane von Breichenruchardt: How to Regain a Freedom - Homeland Stupidity