“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
That is the Second Amendment, in its entirety. There’s nothing in there that says that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed if you cannot lawfully own a firearm. There’s nothing in there that says that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed if you don’t like immigration law and want to protect yourself from local or federal agents enforcing those laws. There’s nothing in there that the right to keep and bear arms, so that you can commit illegal acts.
Don Lemon, now a free-agent pundit after being dismissed from CNN and failing to gain traction as a host on X, doesn’t seem to grasp that. In fact, he seems to be hell-bent on proving why he’s a free agent in the world of well-remunerated punditry: because he’s now basically telling illegal aliens and others who might be targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to get guns to defend themselves from the people targeting them for lawbreaking. Which is breaking more laws.
Some quality understanding of the Second Amendment there, Don.
Appearing on Wajahat Ali’s podcast in an episode published last week, Lemon made it clear that anyone who isn’t white should consider buying themselves a gun — but not for lawful reasons, even if he couched it that way.
“Black people, brown people of all stripes — whether you’re an Indian-American or Mexican-American or whoever you are — go out in your place where you live and get a gun legally,” Lemon said.
“Get a license to carry legally. Because when you have people knocking on your door and taking you away without due process as a citizen, isn’t that what the Second Amendment was written for?
“Go back and read what the Second Amendment says,” he added. “And perhaps it will knock some sense in the head — in the heads of these people.”
Lemon tells non-whites to get armed to fight ICE: “Get a gun for when they go knockin on your door” CC: @FBI pic.twitter.com/7wvJPJ7Bsb
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 16, 2025
Does Don Lemon understand the Second Amendment?
Just to be clear: Since Don Lemon has enough buyout cash from CNN to maintain a phalanx of attorneys, I’m guessing, he made sure to couch this as all being entirely legal and on the up-and-up.
A few seconds prior to where this clip began, Lemon said that people “who are here legally and who can go and buy a gun legally and have a license to carry legally, go do it.” Fine. But that doesn’t precisely cover what he’s talking about here:
What he’s effectively doing is urging armed resistance to ICE under the pretext that they’re effectively a tyrannical secret police who are taking citizens away and deporting them without due process. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence, something that Lemon — spoiler alert, just in case you aren’t familiar with Don Lemon’s and his general perspicacity when formulating his justification for wink-wink-nudge-nudge rhetoric like this — doesn’t have.
In case you need evidence for this, here’s Lemon, on CNN hosting duty, speculating what might have happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — while couching it in saying that this speculation might sound “preposterous,” but it’s what people were talking about:
Don Lemon entertained the notion that
Flight MH370 was swallowed by a Black Hole ..😂pic.twitter.com/1ORvAwdPXF https://t.co/eud8eJYmNe— Lawyerforlaws (@lawyer4laws) March 14, 2024
And just as “Lost” was a fictional TV show, the idea of ICE coming to take away those who can lawfully own guns is farcical.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 922, for instance, it is illegal for someone who is “[a]n alien who is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or … has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa” to own a firearm. That would include — here’s another spoiler for you, I’m chock full of them today — virtually everyone who’s being detained by ICE.
If you are being detained by ICE and you are a legal citizen or can legally own a gun, guess what? It is also still not in your best interest to point it at federal officers, because due process does exist — as well as murder, manslaughter, and assault with a deadly weapon charges, which you will probably be hit with regardless of your legal status in this country if you point a gun and/or shoot it at a federal agent. “Don Lemon told me to do it” does not work as a viable defense in court, either.
Lemon’s argument, then, effectively boils down to this: Maybe if law enforcement agents think they’re going to get murdered, they’ll stop enforcing laws. He’s not saying do anything illegal, mind you, he’s just saying.
Even Jay Jones, the Democratic Virginia attorney general nominee who said he wouldn’t mind shooting and killing the commonwealth’s Republican House speaker and/or his children on text messages, explicitly disavowed allegations he made this argument about police officers to put the fear of God into them. When you’re openly making an argument Jay Jones won’t even take responsibility for making in private, there are problems.
I’ll give him this much, though: At least Don Lemon seems to realize he’s unemployable in the real media sphere at this point. If the grift involves him going as radical as possible, grift he will — but he won’t beg his way back onto the CNN or MSNBC/MSNOW punditocracy by acting rational and suggesting people don’t break the law while following the law, however.
Given his downtime in his new self-employment role, perhaps he can enroll in a community college class on constitutional rights, so he can figure out exactly what the Second Amendment really allows you to do. Lord knows the man’s got the bandwidth these days, and he’s also sorely in need of something like that.
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