Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (March 4, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance hearing on Republican efforts to dismantle proven gun safety laws and make communities less safe.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing

WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance
Hearing on “The Right to Self Defense”
March 4, 2025

In 2022, shocking levels of gun violence caused Congress to come together after decades of inaction to pass the first major piece of gun safety legislation in 28 years. Ever since President Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (ATF) into law and with the invaluable efforts of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, we have made substantial gains in reversing our gun violence epidemic. We ended 2024 with a 25% drop nationwide homicides as compared to 2022 and since firearms are involved in roughly 80% of murders in this country, addressing gun crime is essential to addressing homicides and violent crime, in general.

According to the Office of Gun Violence Prevention's One Year Progress report in September 2024, more than 600 defendants had been charged under our new gun trafficking and straw purchasing laws; and 900 firearms transfers to people under the age of 21 were prevented by enhanced background checks.

The key point is that this law and other Biden Administration regulations saved thousands of lives, contributing to 3,500 fewer murders between 2023 and 2024, without ever once infringing on the Second Amendment. We know this because the Supreme Court never invalidated any part of the Bipartisan Safe Communities Act or any other Biden Administration gun safety regulation as a violation of the Second Amendment. These measures have all been deemed constitutional.

Yet Republicans continue to insist that commonsense gun safety laws of this type violate the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment does not protect the right to access a firearm without a violent criminal background check or the right to purchase machine guns or military-style assault weapons, even though both involve arms. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld reasonable regulations to protect public safety as consistent with the Second Amendment. Meanwhile the party of states’ rights wants to preempt state and local law and force Americans to accept more dangerous weapons in their communities when they might have chosen otherwise.

I challenge my Colleagues to explain how any of the Biden Administration reforms actually violate the Second Amendment, because no court ever said they did.

The problem is that my Republican colleagues have completely deformed the Second Amendment. They say it gives you the right to overthrow the government. Our former colleague, Matt Gaetz often claimed that the Second Amendment “is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.”

This purported right to overthrow the government means that the people must enjoy access to munitions equivalent to that of the government’s arsenal. As our colleague, Representative Chip Roy, argues, the Second Amendment was “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.” And my friend Representative Lauren Boebert says that the Second Amendment has “nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.” 

Despite all of this pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric about how the Constitution provides a right of civil insurrection, the actual Constitution, in a half-dozen different places, treats “insurrection” and “rebellion” not as protected rights but as serious and dangerous offenses against our government and our people.

Article I gives Congress the power to “provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” The guarantee clause in Article IV tells the United States to guarantee a republican form of government to the states and protect them “against domestic violence.” These provisions followed Shays’s Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts in the 1780s which the Founders strongly condemned.

The Constitution also thoroughly rejects the right-wing fantasy that random bands of disgruntled citizens can claim the powers of the institutional “Militia” to commit violent acts against public officials. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 reserves “to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress”. This intergovernmental cooperation is how we come to have what the Second Amendment calls for in its first clause: “a well-regulated Militia.”

The Supreme Court has been clear that the Second Amendment’s reference to a “well-regulated militia” means well-regulated by the government. Not the Proud Boys and not the Oath Keepers. In 1886, the Court upheld an Illinois law criminalizing private paramilitary groups as a legitimate measure quote “necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.” The “militia” is not some reserve power to rebel against the government but the well-organized instrument by which state and federal governments have opposed domestic violence.

When I point out these problems with constitutional insurrectionism, my GOP House colleagues fall back on two responses. First, they quote profusely from Patrick Henry—of “Give me liberty or give me death” fame—which is amusing because Henry was an anti-Federalist who opposed the ratification of the Constitution. It’s like quoting speeches by the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis to settle the meaning of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

My Republican colleagues also invoke the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence for the idea that after a “long train of abuses and usurpations,” aggrieved people have the right to “alter or to abolish” the bonds holding them to a tyrannical government.

This is true, of course, but also perfectly irrelevant. The revolutionaries undoubtedly asserted their right as a matter of natural law to overthrow a tyrannical government. That’s very different from saying the Constitution itself guarantees the right to have the means to overthrow the government. If you think that the 2020 presidential election, for example—which Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232—is an exercise of tyranny akin to King George’s tyranny against the colonists, by all means, you can come down and beat up our police officers and try to overthrow the government. But if we catch you and we stop you, we will prosecute you under the full force of the law and put you in jail, at least until the next president decides to pardon the people who've done that.

This fraudulent constitutional philosophy of insurrectionism is exacting a brutal toll on the American people and our social contract by blockading reasonable and perfectly constitutional gun safety measures that are saving lives in America. The whole purpose of the social contract is to make ourselves safer than we would be in a lawless state of nature. And yet the insurrectionist caucus has brought gruesome episodes of high-tech military-style violence into daily life across the country.

It is time to reassert the real primacy of the Constitution and its real meaning.

Thank you and I yield back.