Talley earns 'A Rating' by Oklahoma 2A

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Longtime Chickasha community leader Randy Talley has earned an important rating in his quest to serve as State Representative in Oklahoma’s 56th House District.

“I am honored to get the A Rating of Oklahoma’s most active and Constitutionally minded pro-2nd Amendment organization,” Talley said. “Our rights as citizens have been attacked from all sides, but the right to keep and bear arms is core to our civil liberties. If a man or woman is denied the right to self defense, then all liberties will be surrendered too.”

The debate over who should keep and bear arms has been fought throughout history, Talley said. “Unfortunately, most countries have sought to limit or deny these rights. Thankfully, our founders believed that self defense was core to all freedoms.”

From our start as a nation, and despite the clarity by which our founders spoke on these issues, Americans have been divided, Talley said.

Even the words in the U.S. Constitution are used to explain away gun rights -- “should only a ‘militia’ and not individual citizens own guns?” -- but Alexander Hamilton -- the scholar, statesman and economist who was a founder, wrote this:

“The constitution shall never be construed … to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

I appreciate the integrity of great intellectual liberals like legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, himself a self-described liberal Democrat, who wrote in strong defense of the 2nd Amendment:

“Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard, don't see the danger in the big picture,” wrote Dershowitz, who taught law at Harvard for 50 years. “They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.”

Talley grew up in Caddo County on a ranch north of Anadarko owned by his grandfather, the late John Stalder. He learned with his three brothers and sister about core freedoms from his grandfather and his dad, the late Max Talley, who served on the City Council and as vice mayor of Anadarko in the 1970s.

“I owe a huge debt to my mentors in these freedoms,” Talley said. “In this generation, the Oklahoma Second Amendment Association is doing essential work for all Oklahomans -- whether they understand it or not -- by serving as an outspoken voice for Constitutional

freedoms. Given our history, the controversy over gun rights will never be a settled matter. We’ll need to continue upholding the founders’ intent or it will be lost.”