Dr. Robert Sumner passed away in December 2016. The Biblical Evangelist newspaper is no longer being published and the ministry of Biblical Evangelism has ceased operation.

The remaining inventory of his books and gospel tracts was transferred to The Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles and may be ordered here.

THE SECOND AMENDMENT!
Dr. Robert L. Sumner

Well, they’ve done it again! That infamous Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the one that gave us deleting “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance) in California, which is to the West of most of us – as well as being to the Left of nearly all of us (every Patriotic American) – has done it again. This time, ruling on the Second Amendment, it decided that the constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” really doesn’t belong to the people at all!

The radicals sitting on the 9th Court recently ruled that such right does not belong to an individual at all, but only to a collection of individuals. The clincher of their ruling was that even this right is only when the individuals involved are acting on behalf of the government.

This kicks all sanity out of the amendment, of course. Our Founding Fathers (and if you feminists don’t like that term, drop us a note listing the names of the women on those committees) put that into the Bill of Rights of our Constitution because they saw what governments can do to their subjects and never wanted such to happen to Americans. They wanted us to have the right to overthrow a government if it became tyrannical, as the government had from whence they came. To say that this amendment doesn’t give individuals the right to bear arms shows the ignorance of the justices about American history and constitutional law.

The Court had the same 2-1 ruling this time as with “under God,” and Justice Alex Kozinski again vigorously dissented. He wrote: “About twenty percent of the American population, those who live in the Ninth Circuit, have lost one of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights.” If you don’t think that is alarming, he went on to note: “And the methodology used to take away the right threatens the rest of the Constitution. The most extraordinary step taken by the panel opinion is to read the frequently used Constitutional phrase, ‘the people,’ as conferring rights only upon collectives, not individuals. There is no logic to this misreading, so it threatens all the rights the Constitution guarantees to ‘the people,’ including those having nothing to do with guns.” If the Second Amendment doesn’t give every law-abiding citizen a right to bear arms, it is absolutely meaningless.

Commenting on the practice of some jurists to institute social change in their decisions “while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home,” Kozinski declared, Expanding some [rights] to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumbled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.”

Alas, that is what is happening before our very eyes and most of us feel helpless to do anything about it.Most of the media chose to ignore the ruling, so you may not know about it. Now that you do, start writing letters to the editor of your local paper, expressing dismay and urging the populace to start a ruckus that will get the attention of the powers that be. Hopefully, that is.