Andrea Mitchell channeled her inner Moreno in her afternoon broadcast today, when she said that the Second Amendment can be infringed because we already do it to the First. Mitchell had Gun Owners For America’s Eric Pratt on her show, and NewsBusters’ Kyle Drennan reported that this remark was “in response to Pratt explaining: “…a very important concept of inalienable rights, because whether it’s the right to vote, right to sit behind a microphone, or the right to choose how I’m going to protect myself, all those rights cannot be infringed, as the Second Amendment says.”
ERICH PRATT: Well, we don’t think that any of the things that he’s proposing would have stopped what happened in Connecticut, wouldn’t have stopped Adam Lanza from killing a victim and stealing those firearms to commit such an atrocity. If there is an area of agreement that we have with the President, he quoted from the Declaration of Independence saying that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that’s a very important concept of inalienable rights, because whether it’s the right to vote, right to sit behind a microphone, or the right to choose how I’m going to protect myself, all those rights cannot be infringed, as the Second Amendment says.
ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, they can be infringed, because the First Amendment is infringed, I have to obey all sorts of regulations from the FCC, there are things we can’t say in a crowded theater, so every right also carries with it responsibilities and obligations.
PRATT: What’s interesting about that, though, is we don’t gag people before they go into the theater, we punish the lawbreakers. And in the same way, we would argue punish those who abuse the right, but don’t gag law-abiding citizens before they exercise their right. We shouldn’t be registering them like sex offenders, like they are in New York. We shouldn’t be in any way impeding them if they have not committed a crime.
It sad that we have a political wing of this country who feel that the Bill of Rights is nothing more than toilet paper.
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