David Rivkin on Gun Control and the Second Amendment

The following is a transcript of David Rivkin’s appearance on the BBC Newshour radio broadcast on December 17, 2012.  The show was a direct response to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

Host: David Rivkin joined us from the Washington studio and on the line from San Francisco I also spoke to Clara Jeffrey who is coeditor of Mother Jones a left leaning investigations magazine, does she think that this is a turning point?

Clara Jeffery: I think it could be, I think this has outraged the country. It’s one of many mass shootings this year.  The numbers keep getting worse and worse. We’ve had twice as many casualties as in any year past and I think it will behoove ordinary people to organize and responsible gun owners to step forward and say that they too support reasonable restrictions.  We need to put the wind behind politicians to make the change.

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The courts would no more allow government to undermine the Second Amendment than the First.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Could there be a better illustration of the cultural divide over firearms than the White House photograph of our skeet-shooting president? Clay pigeons are launched into the air, but the president’s smoking shotgun is level with the ground. This is not a man who is comfortable around guns. And that goes a long way toward explaining his gun-control agenda.

Lack of informed presidential leadership aside, there is a gulf between those Americans who view guns as invaluable tools for self-defense, both against private wrongdoers and a potentially tyrannical government, and those who regard that concept as hopelessly archaic and even subversive. For them, hunting is the only possible legitimate use of firearms, and gun ownership should be restricted to weapons suited to that purpose.

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Constitutional attorney David Rivkin discussed the legal implications of President Obama’s announcement on gun control on Fox and Friends on January 16, 2013.

“We did not know for sure, we clearly know one thing, he cannot do by executive order anything that Congress has not delegated. […] He cannot ban high capacity magazines by executive order. ” – Rivkin in response to Brian Kilmeade’s question on what to expect today.

Has the United States Constitution become outdated and obsolete? Constitutional attorney David Rivkin debates Constitutional Law Professor Louis Michael Seidman on whether or not it’s time to ditch the Constitution.

By defining the mandate as a tax, one that will not be uniformly applied, the Supreme Court ran afoul of the Constitution.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

ObamaCare is being implemented, having been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in June in a series of cases now known as National Federation of Independent Business v. HHS. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the court took a law that was flawed but potentially workable and transformed it into one that is almost certainly unworkable. More important, the justices also may have created new and fatal constitutional problems.

ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act, was conceived as a complex statutory scheme designed to provide Americans with near-universal health-care coverage and to effectively federalize the nation’s health-care system. The law’s core provision was an individual health-insurance purchase mandate, adopted by Congress as a “regulation” of interstate commerce. The provision required most Americans to buy federally determined minimum health-care insurance, or to pay a penalty more or less equivalent to the cost of that coverage.

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Appellate and international attorney David Rivkin joins a panel at the Cato Institute’s annual publication of its review of the Supreme Court and its Constitution Day celebration in Washington D.C.

The following highlight’s David Rivkin and his remarks on the 2011 Supreme Court term review and health care law to the panel and audience members.