Froman, who is a practicing attorney in Tucson, AZ, rounded out the day’s agenda by telling the audience that, “The single most important fight for firearms freedom in our lifetime is not legislation or on Capitol Hill, but the fight to put pro-Second Amendment judges into our federal courts, including most importantly our US Supreme Court.”
“Today more than ever it doesn’t always matter who are the leaders we elect or defeat or what legislation they enact,” she stated. “Nothing we do about lawmakers or the laws matters if the judges who apply those laws don’t apply those laws as intended.“There are almost 900 federal judges,” she continued, “not a single one of them is accountable to voters because not one of them is elected.”
“Like it or not, the federal judiciary in this country represents the Second Amendment’s trump card and its Achilles heel,” Froman cautioned. “Given the way some activist judges have ignored the Constitution and rewritten our laws, it’s clear that a single federal judge could have more power than all 435 members of the House of Representatives, all 100 US senators and the president of the United States combined.”
Froman turned her attention to the New Orleans mess, and the joint SAF-NRA lawsuit that brought the gun grabs to a halt.
“In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, honest, peaceful, lawful people are having their firearms confiscated,” Froman said. “Government officials can’t protect them, but they also won’t let them protect themselves. . . . A lot of people always say it will never happen here. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it already has happened right in New Orleans. . . . Thankfully NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation moved quickly.”
She also criticized the ATF for its heavy-handed harassment of people who attended a Richmond, VA, gun show in August. Those agents, supported by Virginia state troopers and officers from Henrico County and the city of Richmond, used information from Federal 4473 forms to conduct “residence checks” of prospective guy buyers at the show.
“Federal law did not give them the authority to do any of this,” she said. “But federal law apparently wasn’t enough to stop them, either.”
“If New Orleans authorities violated the law when they confiscated the firearms of victims of Hurricane Katrina, there needs to be consequences for the violation of that law,” Froman insisted. “If state and federal officials overstepped their authority when they harassed and intimidated the patrons of a Virginia gun show, there need to be consequences for that kind of conduct. And if San Francisco voters adopt a ban on all handguns in the city and if that ban infringes on the right to keep and bear arms, then there need to be controls to protect the rights of citizens.
“We need judges who respect the laws of the United States,” she continued, “especially the Constitution, not remake the law to their own liking because they think that another country is more enlightened than the United States. We need judges who uphold the Constitution, not as they wish it were written, not as foreign authorities think it ought to be written, but exactly as it was written and ratified in 1789 and as the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and not just in the Supreme Court but in every courtroom across America.”