Keyes to the Kingdom <$NoAd$>…
Declaring “the front line of the war against terror once again involves the citizens,” Republican Alan Keyes said Tuesday he believes the U.S. Constitution grants properly trained private individuals the right to own and carry machine guns.
“You’re not talking about giving citizens access to atom bombs and other things,” the former presidential candidate said. “That’s ridiculous.”
But the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate argued the founding fathers intended the Second Amendment to allow people to carry the types of weapons “customarily carried in those days by ordinary infantry soldiers.”
“And, yes, does that mean that in this day and age people would have the right to have access to the kind of the weapons our ordinary infantry people have access to? With proper training and so forth to make sure that they could handle them successfully, that’s exactly what was meant.”
Keyes made the remarks at a news conference he called to attack the “ideological extremism” of his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Barack Obama.
See the rest in the Chicago Sun-Times …
By the way, you know Keyes is in good form here since he has to note that allowing citizens to bear atomic weapons would be an excessively literalist reading of the 2nd Amendment.
