A firebrand Southern lawmaker spoke out against further restrictions on the Second Amendment during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing this week. 

Congressman Clay Higgins, the straight-talking Louisiana lawman who earned a reputation as the "Cajun John Wayne" before running as a Republican for Congress, confronted Joseph Gramaglia, the Police Commissioner for Buffalo, New York, over the Commish’s support for controversial "red flag" gun seizure laws.

"So, you support confiscating guns from individuals 'determined to be a threat to themselves or others – determined to be,'" asked Higgins. "By this legislation, my colleagues are putting forth, my understanding of the letter of that law, which I 1,000 percent oppose as would our Founding Fathers, the letter of that law says an anonymous tip from a citizen. So, if this was law, Commissioner, would you confiscate? Would you go to your neighbor’s home and confiscate his legally owned weapons? A man that was not under criminal investigation nor under arrest. Would you do it?

Gramaglia: The red flag laws would...

Higgins:    That’s a yes or no, brother. I got five minutes to make an hour and a half statement here.

Gramaglia: It’s more than a yes or no answer. It would be up to – it would...

Higgins: We’ll move on. If you cannot say yes, you would confiscate weapons from an American citizen that was subject to this law that my colleagues intend to push through this Congress, and you said in your statement that you would confiscate those weapons if an American was determined to be – your quote – a threat to themselves or others. According to the letter of the law, determined to be is defined by an anonymous tip that an American citizen is a threat to themselves or others. You’re a police commissioner, a "thin blue line" brother sworn to uphold the Constitution, and you’re saying you’d seize those weapons. I see that as a problem. 

Then Higgins sat back and delivered a monologue on life, liberty, and gun laws, which is just a home run. 

I’m gonna bring us back in time to World War Two. America’s population: 140 million. 15 million American men came home from World War Two with deep scars and significant skills. They bore the invisible wounds of war and there were weapons everywhere. Want to to talk about mental challenges...

My father was one of those men who was a Navy pilot in WWII. He came back from the War and built his family. I’m the seventh of his eighth children. 

I was born in 1961. We had guns everywhere. There was virtually no regulation. Any child in the ‘50s could buy a weapon from any seller if daddy sent them with the money. We didn’t have mass shootings.

Wasn’t until 1968 in America that serial numbers were even required on weapons sold in this country. You ordered weapons through the Sears catalog by the mail.

In the ‘70s I attended high school, a large rural school. Virtually every vehicle in the parking lot was a pickup truck and almost every one had a rifle or a shotgun in the back glass and a pistol under the seat, but we didn’t have school shootings. 

In 1979 I began college. One of the jobs I had to work my way through college was as a carpenter. We restored historical buildings. We had to determine in the process of that work what was the original cuts of these homes, residential homes built 75, 85, 100 years ago. You could tell by the saw cut if it was a mechanical cut, an electric cut, or a hand-cut. By such observations, we knew exactly how that house was originally built. And to my amazement, as a young man beginning college in Louisiana, working, you know what I discovered, Madam Chair? You know what these houses did not have that were built 100 years ago in cities in America? 

You know what they did not have, Commissioner?

Locks!

Locks! 

Now I ask you all: what happened to that country, man?

A country where homes were built in cities with no locks.

A country where guns were everywhere and virtually not regulated at all.

Where millions of Americans, 14 million Americans came back-- 11 percent of the population at the time-- after WWII with incredible skills of war-- and "weapons of war" as you call them-- everywhere, but we didn’t have mass shootings.

And here we sit today where an entire once-proud Democratic party is presenting unbelievably unconstitutional laws to press upon our nation, and we have a police commissioner that says he would go home-to-home and confiscate legally owned weapons if he got a tip. 

Madam Chair, I yield my speech, but I will not yield my opposition to these unconstitutional laws.

Higgins this week voted against both H.R. 7910 and H.R. 2377, Democrat anti-gun laws which passed the House on roughly party-line votes.

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