Richard Cohen Quotes
If you told me back in my Army days that I could have bought the same weapon that I had been using in training, I would not have believed it.
Cohen, Richard. "Ban the AR-15." The Washington Post, 20 Jun. 2016.
This was the critical Supreme Court decision which finally decided the long debated issue or whether the right to bear arms was an individual right or a collective militia right. Scalia’s majority opinion ruled it an individual right, but it allowed for exceptions where there might be unusual individual risk. It also upheld the right of the government to control where guns are carried and to regulate the commercial sale of firearms which some of the pro gun extremists had insisted the government had no right of regulaltion.
The Southern Rebels who insisted on their right to have guns during Reconstruction, viciously denied that same right to the newly freed slaves. Sickles tried to remedy this, but the KKK and other terrorists intimidated most of the Blacks into not using the right that they had. Later, they would do that with the right to vote.
This historical quotation gives us an interesting picture or Secret Service practices and First Family Security in 1937. Unlike all the first ladies before her and most after her, she was a very active political figure and regularly received threats. Yet she not only drove alone on occasions, but published that fact to the world in this column. Also, although an extreme liberal, she had little trouble carrying a gun and learning to use it. Her father and her Uncle Theodore Roosevelt both were very comfortable with guns. What is surprising is that the Secret Service did not provide more protection for her. At that time gun ownership had not yet become a political issue, and Mrs. Roosevelt, a committed liberal, thought nothing of “packing heat” at a personal level.
Richard Martin Cohen is an American writer best known for his syndicated column in The Washington Post, which he wrote from 1976 to 2019.
