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Firearm

personal weapon using combustion or an explosive charge to propel a projectile

A firearm is a portable gun (a barreled ranged weapon) that inflicts damage on targets by launching one or more projectiles driven by rapidly expanding high-pressure gas produced chemically by exothermic combustion (deflagration) of propellant within an ammunition cartridge.

Let us hope our weapons are never needed... Do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights. ~ Edward Abbey

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Quotes

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An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. ~ Edward Abbey
 
Most cowboys think it's an infringement on their rights to give up shooting in town, and if it is, it stands, for your six-shooters are no match for Winchesters and buckshot; and Dodge's officers are as game a set of men as ever faced danger. ~ Andy Adams
 
If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. ~ Anonymous
 
The top 5 countries for mass shootings per capita all have "restrictive" gun policies. ~ Kyle Becker
 
Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not. ~ Hilaire Belloc
 
Oh, you've got a gun? So, you want to pop that? ~ Calvin C. Broadus
 
I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. ~ William S. Burroughs
 
I settle my vendettas with AKs, Berettas. ~ Von Carlisle
 
And I swear that I don't have a gun

No, I don't have a gun… ~ Kurt Cobain

 
I pull my trigger back; the bullets go. Boom, boom, boom! Now, I'm on death row. ~ Eric Collins
 
Going wild. Every night they shoot; it's like Beirut. Maybe you should get a Kevlar vest for your chest; anytime stepping through my hood. But that'll do you no good. One slug to your face? Don't hate. You're getting smoked, like wood. ~ Eric D. Collins
 
The good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemakers. ~ Samuel Colt
 
You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. ~ Irwin Corey
 
War! What do you think all these bullets and all these guns're made for? ~ Lavell Crump
 
You gotta shoot straight! Straight doesn't seem good enough! ~ Hampton Fancher & David Peoples
 
Coming out the slums! It's the hoodlums, I'm pulling my gat out on all you bums! ~ Louis Freese
 
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
 
Strapped up, ready to roll. ~ Torrance Hatch
 
An armed society is a polite society. ~ Robert Heinlein
 
There are no good guns. There are no bad guns. Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody — except bad people... ~ Charlton Heston
 
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. ~ Adolf Hitler
 
Having access to a firearm for a child who is experiencing a behavioral health crisis is an absolute recipe for the most tragic things you can imagine. ~ Benjamin Hoffman
 
When that window rolls down and that A.K. comes out? You can squeeze your little handgun, until you run out. ~ Curtis Jackson
 
Fuck with my dough? Then, the guns come out! ~ Curtis Jackson
 
our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, … or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom... ~ Thomas Jefferson
 
As long as the gangster has access to guns, either pistols or machine guns, he is a bold, bad-man, menacing society and mocking at law and decency, but once robbed of his guns he is a yellow rat who will crawl into his hole. ~ Jason Joy
 
By... our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing; by allowing all of these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
The majority falls prey to the delusion, popular in some circles, that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth, born of experience, is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. ~ Alex Kozinski
 
All too many of the other great tragedies of history, Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few, were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece. ~ Alex Kozinski
 
If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars. ~ Alex Kozinski
 
Armed men don’t sit down and talk. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
 
To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. ~ Richard Henry Lee
 
Nowadays you don't go around on the street kicking people, punching people — because if you do (makes gun shape with hand), well that's it — I don't care how good you are. ~ Bruce Lee
 
People, let me say God has made you free. Although you have been deprived of your God-given rights by your so-called 'masters', you are now as free as I am, and if those that claim to be your "superiors" do not know that you are free, take the sword and bayonet and teach them that you are; for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ~ Abraham Lincoln
 
I think these things (firearms) were invented by Satan himself, for they can’t be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming. ~ Martin Luther
 
Because there is nothing proportionate between the armed and the unarmed; and it is not reasonable that he who is armed should yield obedience willingly to him who is unarmed, or that the unarmed man should be secure among armed servants. Because, there being in the one disdain and in the other suspicion, it is not possible for them to work well together. ~ Niccolò Machiavelli
 
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. ~ Mao Zedong
 
Riley Freeman: [P]retend your some stupid parents activist person...
Who would you rather start a beef with – some nerd who makes video games, or some dude with a warehouse full of AK-47s? ~ Aaron McGruder
 
Huey Freeman: I’ll check the old testament, but I’m pretty sure Moses wasn’t packin’ heat. ~ Aaron McGruder
 
Gun control has always been racist and discriminatory. The ultimate objective of gun control is to control an unarmed people by an armed oppressor. ~ Geoff Metcalf
 
I can't even think about this movie. I don't WANT to think about it because if I think about it I will have to face an ugly truth that has been gnawing through my head...
This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed — without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! — I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing? ~ Michael Moore
 
No freedman, Negro, or Mulatto shall carry or keep firearms or ammunition. ~ Mississippi Black Code of 1865
 
I mean I'm a gun-owning pacifist, so there you go. ~ Krist Novoselic
 
Arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong. ~ Thomas Paine
 
The more people know that members of our community may be armed, the less likely they will be to single us out for attack. ~ Pink Pistols
 
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers. ~ Joseph Story
 
A shotgun is a tool. The correct application in the right situation will give you the best results. ~ Ken Swift
 
Why are the feds worried about me clocking on this corner, when there's politicians out here getting popped in Arizona? ~ Fredrick Tipton
 
[T]he balls sent by this gun are not ordinary balls, but little cases of glass. These glass cases are covered with a case of steel, and weighted with a pellet of lead; they are real Leyden bottles, into which the electricity is forced to a very high tension. With the slightest shock they are discharged, and the animal, however strong it may be, falls dead. ~ Jules Verne
 
Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs. ~ Bruce Willis
 
So what do you need? Besides a miracle? ~ Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski
 
“People were allowed to own guns, and everyone did own guns [in the West], for the most part. Having a firearm to protect yourself in the lawless wilderness from wild animals, hostile native tribes, and outlaws was a wise idea. But when you came into town, you had to either check your guns if you were a visitor or keep your guns at home if you were a resident. ~ Adam Winkler
 
I've never seen any rhetoric from that time period saying that the only thing that's going to reduce violence is more people with guns. It seems to be much more of a 20th-century attitude than one associated with the Wild West. ~ Adam Winkler
 
Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God. ~ Barry Wong and John Woo
 
"Games today are very, very real. It's the weapons; it's the story lines, you know, that people get caught up in — even the optics that are used on the guns, it says L-3 EOTech. It actually has the name of the brand on the side of it so you know which optic, you know, you could go out and buy. ~ Sami Yenigun
 
Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. And my dreams are the same. Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I am here to speak for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. ~ Malala Yousafzai
 
Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion I have learned from Mohamed, the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This the legacy of change I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of nonviolence that I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learned from my father and from my mother. This is what my soul is telling me: be peaceful and love everyone. ~ Malala Yousafzai

A

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  • The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
  • I stand with Survivors Empowered and other organizations fighting for gun reform. And I've been a strong supporter of controversial activist strategies over the past 50 years. But we need to be effective so that we change the country for the better without curtailing the legitimate rights of others. As I have learned the hard way, social change is exceedingly slow and cautious, and moves at all only because we continually prod it to do so. We all seek peace, but as W.B. Yeats wrote, "Peace comes dropping slow."
  • If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
    • Anonymous American adage, as quoted in The Wayward Welfare State (1981) by Roger A. Freeman, p. 286
    • When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
      • Bumper sticker, quoted in Design with Type (1982) by Carl Dair, p. 174.
  • Лучше старенький ТТ, чем дзюдо и каратэ.
  • To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders of towns, countries or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws.
    • John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States", (January 1787).
  • And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.
    • Samuel Adams, (6 February 1788), reported in Charles Hale, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1856), p. 86. This language was proposed in the Massachusetts convention for ratification of the U.S. Constitution to be added to Article I of that document.
  • Real G, thoroughbred from the streets. Pants sagging, with my gun in my drawers.
    • Akon, "Soul Survivor" (2005)

  • Suddenly the men of Troop G pause and wheel around, rifles upraised.  At 12:24 one of them, possibly an officer, fires his weapon.  This is immediately followed by a staccato sound like a series of giant firecrackers exploding.  At least ten guardsmen fire fifty-five rifle bursts, five pistol shots, and a shotgun blast at students over a hundred yards away in the parking lot.

    When echoes of the fusillade fade away, thirteen bodies are sprawled on the ground.  Nine students are wounded.  Four are dead—Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer, and Jeffrey Miller.  Of the thirteen who were shot, only two have been hit frontally.  Seven have bullets in their sides and four in their backs, proving they were not advancing but fleeing.

    One young guardsman is horrified by the spectacle.  Falling to the ground and tossing hysterically, he cries out, "I just shot two teenagers!"  The other guardsmen march off up the hill, leaving the dead and wounded behind.

B

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  • The laws of [false utility] are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator?
  • Whatever happens, we have got
    The Maxim gun, and they have not.
  • "The highest love, a woman's touch / Harmony, a strong mind, a strong body, beauty, all the things / He couldn't be, all / The things he couldn't have. / Little man with a gun in his hand"
  • Zardoz, speaks to you, his chosen ones. You have been raised up from brutality to kill the brutals that multiply and are legion. To this end, Zardoz, gave you the gift of the gun. The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of man, as once it was. But the gun shoots death and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill. Zardoz has spoken.
    • Zardoz written by John Boorman
  • I've got my twin Glock 40s cocked back, me and my homies. So, drop that.
  • Oh, you've got a gun? So, you want to pop that?
    • Calvin Broadus, "Drop It Like It's Hot" (2004), R&G: The Masterpiece (2004)
  • Wait for your answer; go over there. But, if she pack a gun? You know you'd better run fast!
  • After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

C

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  • The firepower wielded by organised crime groups in Mexico has not only led to mounting instability in the US's southern neighbour, but also contributed to lawlessness on the two countries' shared border and the deaths of American agents. As the U.S. invests millions in Mexico's security through the Merida initiative, it does itself a disservice by allowing lax gun regulation to arm the same groups it is trying to combat. Poor gun regulation and oversight also threatens the U.S. by providing potential terrorists with easy access to military grade weapons, as was boasted by American-born al-Qaida member Adam Gadahn in a recent video.
  • The spirit of murder seems to be on the increase in our day. This is partly due to the increase of firearms and to their cheapness, also to the fashion which prevails in many quarters of carrying deadly weapons. The frequency with which shooting is done also has its effect to break down the feeling of sacredness which should surround human life.
  • I settle my vendettas with AKs, Berettas.
    • Von Carlisle, "40 Oz." (2004), D12 World, Interscope Records
  • I've got army guns... Got a gun; never caught without one.
  • We are not anti-gun: we are anti-bullet holes in our patients. Most upsetting, actually, is death and disability from gun violence that is unparalleled in the world.
  • Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.
  • When they kick out your front door
    How you gonna come?
    With your hands on your head
    Or on the trigger of your gun?

    When the law break in
    How you gonna go?
    Shot down on the pavement
    Or waiting on death row?

    You can crush us
    You can bruise us
    But you'll have to answer to
    Oh, the guns of Brixton.
  • I pull my trigger back; the bullets go. Boom, boom, boom! Now, I'm on death row. Fuck it.
  • Going wild. Every night they shoot; it's like Beirut. Maybe you should get a Kevlar vest for your chest; anytime stepping through my hood. But that'll do you no good. One slug to your face? Don't hate. You're getting smoked, like wood.
  • The good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemakers.
  • It is a cliche that the gun is a penis-symbol as well as a weapon. Gun organizations are conventionally masculine in cultural style; hunting and gun magazines dress their models in check shirts and boots to emphasize their masculinity. The gun lobby hardly has to labour the inference that politicians trying to take away our guns are emasculating us. At both symbolic and practical levels, the defense of gun ownership is a defense of hegemonic masculinity.
  • The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition.
  • Every black person in America should get a gun and join the National Rifle Association, America's oldest and most august civil rights organization. Apparently this has occurred to no one because our excellent public education system ensures that no American under the age of sixty has the slightest notion of this country's history. Gun control laws were originally promulgated by Democrats to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. This allowed the Democratic policy of slavery to proceed with fewer bumps and, after the Civil War, allowed the Democratic Ku Klux Klan to menace and murder black Americans with little resistance. Contrary to what illiterates believe, the KKK was an outgrowth of the Democratic Party, with overlapping membership rolls. The Klan was to the Democrats what the American Civil Liberties Union is today. Not every Democrat is an ACLU'er, but every ACLU'er is a Democrat. Same with the Klan.
  • In 1640, the very first gun control law ever enacted on these shores was passed in Virginia. It provided that blacks, even freemen, could not own guns. Chief Justice Roger Taney's infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford circularly argued that blacks could not be citizens because if they were citizens, they would have the right to own guns: "[I]t would give them the full liberty," he said, "to keep and carry arms wherever they went." With logic like that, Republicans eventually had to fight a Civil War to get the Democrats to give up slavery. Alas, they were Democrats, so they cheated. After the war, Democratic legislatures enacted 'Black Codes', denying black Americans the rights of citizenship, such as the rather crucial one of bearing arms, while other Democrats, sometimes the same Democrats, founded the Ku Klux Klan. For more than a hundred years, Republicans have aggressively supported arming blacks, so they could defend themselves against Democrats. The original draft of the Anti-Klan Act of 1871, passed at the urging of Republican president Ulysses S. Grant, made it a federal felony to 'deprive any citizen of the United States of any arms or weapons he may have in his house or possession for the defense of his person, family, or property'. This section was deleted from the final bill only because it was deemed both beyond Congress' authority and superfluous, inasmuch as the rights of citizenship included the right to bear arms. Under authority of the Anti-Klan Act, President Grant deployed the U.S. military to destroy the Klan, and pretty nearly completed the job. But the Klan had a few resurgences in the early and mid-20th century. Curiously, wherever the Klan became a political force, gun control laws would suddenly appear on the books. This will give you an idea of how gun control laws worked.
  • Following the firebombing of his house in 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, who was, among other things, a Christian minister, applied for a gun permit, but the Alabama authorities found him unsuitable. A decade later, he won a Nobel Peace Prize. How's that 'may issue' gun permit policy working for you? The NRA opposed these discretionary gun permit laws and proceeded to grant NRA charters to blacks who sought to defend themselves from Klan violence, including the great civil rights hero Robert F. Williams. A World War II Marine veteran, Williams returned home to Monroe, N.C., to find the Klan riding high, beating, lynching and murdering blacks at will. No one would join the NAACP for fear of Klan reprisals. Williams became president of the local chapter and increased membership from six to more than 200. But it was not until he got a charter from the NRA in 1957 and founded the Black Armed Guard that the Klan got their comeuppance in Monroe. Williams' repeated thwarting of violent Klan attacks is described in his stirring book, Negroes With Guns. In one crucial battle, the Klan sieged the home of a black physician and his wife, but Williams and his Black Armed Guard stood sentry and repelled the larger, cowardly force. And that was the end of it. As the Klan found out, it's not so much fun when the rabbit's got the gun. The NRA's proud history of fighting the Klan has been airbrushed out of the record by those who were complicit with the KKK, Jim Crow and racial terror, to wit, the Democrats.
  • Gun control is always a scheme of the powerful to deprive the powerless of the right to self-defense.
  • If I've got nine slugs? Nine bullets're going to fly. If I've got a red beam? Nine people're going to die. Nine mothers gone cry; nine spirits in the sky. Nine preachers preaching nine sermons; telling nine lies.

D

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  • The town in Georgia's got a law on the books / Says if we all got guns then we won't have crooks / Now what could make them think that way?
  • The sun is settin' on the century
    and we are armed to the teeth
    we are all working together now
    to make our lives mercifully brief
    schoolkids keep trying to teach us
    what guns are all about
    confuse liberty with weaponry
    and watch your kids act it out
    every year now like Christmas
    some boy gets the milk-fed suburban blues
    reaches for the available arsenal
    and saunters off to make the news.
  • And If I hear one more time
    about fool's rights
    to his tools of rage
    I'm gonna take all my friends
    and I'm gonna move to Canada
    and we're gonna die of old age.
  • To accept the principle that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns.
    • Tommy Douglas, speech delivered at Luther College, Regina, Saskatchewan, March 16, 1973.
  • A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box because of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex.
  • From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him or for anybody else in America outside the American government; that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country; and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the word to which the people of the North willingly listened when I spoke. Hence, regarding as I did the elective franchise as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the recently-emancipated millions.
  • Will it be a great source of comfort to certain Canadian boys to know that the bullet that maimed them for life was made from Canadian nickel sold by the International Nickel Company?
    • Tommy Douglas Debate, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, April 3, 1939.
  • While nearly anything, including human hands, may be used to kill, the gun is created for the specific purpose of killing a living creature.
    Gun-love can be akin to non-chemical addictions like gambling or hoarding, either of which can have devastating effects, mainly economic, but murder, suicide, accidental death, and mass shootings result only from guns....
    Although each of these mass killings is idiosyncratic, they often share many features, including but not limited to the most obvious, which bears repeating – their use of guns....
    Guns are a sign of potency for many white Americans who otherwise feel they have been wrongly disempowered or disenfranchised, whether by the government, by an employer or colleagues, or by members of other social, political or ethnic groups.

E

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  • The most important lesson I learned ... was that the winner of a gunplay usually was the one who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting—grandstand play—as I would poison ... In all my life as a frontier peace officer, I did not know a really proficient gunfighter who had anything but contempt for the gun-fanner, or the man who literally shot from the hip...
  • I have a very strict gun control policy: if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it.
    • Clint Eastwood, "RJ Eskow: Confessions of a Gun Lover," Huffington Post, (18 April 2007).
  • Come on, Hector: the MAC-10 submachine gun was practically designed for housewives.
  • A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders.
    • Larry Elder, "Million Mom Madness," FrontPageMag (22 May 2000).
  • Hast thou named all the birds without a gun. Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.

F

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  • If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them... Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here.
    • Dianne Feinstein, interview with CBS-TV 60 Minutes (5 February 1995).

G

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  • Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.
  • Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
    • Hermann Göring, radio broadcast (1936), as quoted in The New Language of Politics: An Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage (1968) by William L. Safire, p. 178
  • The ease with which birds and beasts, men, women and children, can now be shot into sudden oblivion is breathtaking. If the murderer had nothing but his hands, he could kill only a few on a single outing, if lucky. But a victim might fight back, and win. What a limitation, a frustration, for the poor murderer. But with a Kalashnikov – joy! – all such frustration vanishes. In a few seconds dozens of human beings can be left twitching and bleeding on the ground, their possibilities, hopes, loves and endeavours abruptly and arbitrarily obliterated, their families drowned in shock and grief. How satisfying for the murderous of mind; how fulfilling; and all thanks to those who make and sell guns.
  • But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you... it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
    • Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, as quoted in "Dalai Lama urges students to shape world," in The Seattle Times (14 May 2001)

H

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  • The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
  • ... [I]f forced to take a position, it seems that the Nazis were more pro-gun than the predecessor Weimar Republic.
    • Harcourt, at 671.
  • If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying — that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 — establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime.
  • Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That's a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It's a good thing.
  • Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense?
    • Patrick Henry (J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions 45, 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1836).
  • It's easy to dispense with the first claim Obama made, that ‍'‍this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries‍'‍... Obama is wrong to say that ‍'‍this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries‍'‍. Clearly it does happen elsewhere, and not in trivial numbers. Seven of the countries saw double-digit numbers of people killed in mass shootings during that period.
  • Let me make a short, opening, blanket comment. There are no good guns. There are no bad guns. Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody — except bad people...
  • England, where no one has guns; fourteen deaths. United States — and I think you know how we feel about guns; whoo! I'm getting' a stiffy — 23,000 deaths from handguns. But there's no connection, and you'd be a fool and a communist to make one.
    • Bill Hicks, Quoted in Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, 2004.
  • The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.
  • GUN CONTROL! That is what the Branch Davidian compound attack was all about. David Koresh was a gun collector and a tax evader. Boy, they didn't like him, and one of the purposes for that raid was to scare the American people into submission. You better register your firearms. Make sure they know. They might come for you as they did for Koresh.
    • Kent Hovind, "Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution Chapter 4" (1996).
  • The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.
    • Hubert Humphrey, “Know Your Lawmakers”, Guns magazine, February 1960, pg. 4.

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  • Every night I talk to God, but he doesn't say nothing back. I know he's protecting me, but I still stay with my gat.
  • When that window rolls down and that A.K. comes out? You can squeeze your little handgun, until you run out... God's on your side? Shit, I'm alright with that. Because we're going to reload the clips and come right back.
  • When I'm called on, I've got a sawed-off. Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off!
    • O'Shea Jackson, "Straight Outta Compton" (1988), Straight Outta Compton (1988).
  • A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.
  • One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.
  • The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, ... or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press.

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  • Nurses regularly witness the catastrophic consequences of gun violence. From treating victims in emergency rooms to supporting communities after mass shootings, nurses are well aware of the worsening nature of this crisis. Declaring gun violence a public health issue is an essential step towards determining practical solutions that can save lives and reduce the trauma and fear that grip communities nationwide.
  • By... our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing; by allowing all of these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., November 1963. Quoted in I have a Dream: the Life and Times of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Lenwood G. Davis, 1973. (p.266).
  • Little kids with guns, only fifteen. Roaming the streets, up to no good. When gunshots? Just watch us, run quickly. I could show you where.
  • God created men. Colonel Colt made them equal.
    • Old frontier saying
    • Quoted in Larry Koller, The Fireside Book of Guns, 1959, page 136
  • The majority falls prey to the delusion, popular in some circles, that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth, born of experience, is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people... A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble. All too many of the other great tragedies of history, Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few, were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. ... If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
  • Gun safety laws, there are a few inconvenient facts... Liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it's complicated. The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half... The assault weapons ban. A 113-page study found no clear indication that it reduced shooting deaths for the 10 years it was in effect. That's because the ban was poorly drafted and because even before the ban, assault weapons accounted for only 2 percent of guns used in crimes. Move on to open-carry and conceal-carry laws. With some 13 million Americans now licensed to pack a concealed gun, many liberals expected gun battles to be erupting all around us. In fact, the most rigorous analysis suggests that all these gun permits caused neither a drop in crime, as conservatives had predicted, nor a spike in killings, as liberals had expected... The fears were overblown... Liberals often inadvertently antagonize gun owners and empower the National Rifle Association by coming across as supercilious, condescending and spectacularly uninformed about the guns they propose to regulate. A classic of gun ignorance. New York passed a law three years ago banning gun magazines holding more than seven cartridges; without realizing that for most guns there is no such thing as a magazine for seven cartridges or less... If lawmakers want to pass gun legislation, they'd best learn about firearms first.

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  • Nowadays you don't go around on the street kicking people, punching people — because if you do (makes gun shape with hand), well that's it — I don't care how good you are.
  • To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.
  • And the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.
  • Happiness is a warm gun.
    • John Lennon, The Beatles, a.k.a. "The White Album" (1968). In a 1970 interview for Rolling Stone Lennon attributed the words to the cover of a gun magazine (Jann S. Wenner, Lennon Remembers (2000)).
  • Hands and arms can be the fastest-moving body parts. For example, an average suspect can move his hand and forearm across his body to a 90-degree angle in 12/100 of a second. He can move his hand from his hip to shoulder height in 18/100 of a second. The average officer pulling the trigger as fast as he can on a Glock, one of the fastest- cycling semi-autos, requires 1/4 second to discharge each round. There is no way an officer can react, track, shoot and reliably hit a threatening suspect's forearm or a weapon in a suspect's hand in the time spans involved.
  • The upper arms move more slowly than the lower arms and hands. But shooting at the upper arms, there's a greater chance you're going to hit the suspect's brachial artery or center mass, areas with a high probability of fatality. So where does shooting only to wound come in when even areas considered by some to ‘safe’ from fatality risk could in fact carry the same level of risk as targeting center mass?
    “Legs tend initially to move slower than arms and to maintain more static positions. However, areas of the lower trunk and upper thigh are rich with vascularity. A suspect who’s hit there can bleed out in seconds if one of the major arteries is severed, so again shooting just to wound may not result in just wounding.
  • In reference to you, colored people, let me say God has made you free. Although you have been deprived of your God-given rights by your so-called 'masters', you are now as free as I am, and if those that claim to be your "superiors" do not know that you are free, take the sword and bayonet and teach them that you are; for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  • I think these things ( firearms ) were invented by Satan himself, for they can't be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming.
  • Mr. Saturday night special
    Got a barrel that's blue and cold.
    Ain't good for nothin'
    But put a man six feet in a hole.
  • Handguns are made for killin'
    They ain't no good for nothin' else
    And if you like to drink your whiskey
    You might even shoot yourself
    So why don't we dump 'em people
    To the bottom of the sea
    Before some ol' fool come around here
    Wanna shoot either you or me

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  • Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate Governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple Government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the Governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
    • James Madison, Federalist No. 46 (1788).
    • Sometimes paraphrased as: “Americans have the right and advantage of being armed, unlike the people of other countries, whose leaders are afraid to trust them with arms.”
  • Fackler [10, 13] however, disputed the shock wave hypothesis, claiming there is no physical evidence to support it, although some support for this hypothesis had already been provided by Harvey [20, 21], Kolsky [31], Suneson et. al. [42, 43], and Crucq [5]. Since that time, other authors suggest there is increasing evidence to support the hypothesis that shock waves from high velocity bullets can cause tissue related damage and damage to the nervous system. This has been shown in various experiments using simulant models [24, 48]. One of the most interesting is a study by Courtney and Courtney [4] who showed a link between traumatic brain injury and pressure waves originating in the thoracic cavity and extremities.
    • Nick Maiden, Historical Overview of Wound Ballistics Research, Forensic Sci Med Pathol (2009) 5:85–89
  • Every communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.
  • The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
  • Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual was to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.
    • George Mason, June 14, 1788, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adooption of the Federal Constitution, 2nd ed. (1861), Jonathan Elliot, v. 3, p. 380. (The "artful man" in the quote is Sir William Keith.) This quote has typically been rephrased by gun control opponents; for instance, "To disarm the people is the most effectual way to enslave them."
Caesar: Right…
Huey: It’s the frightening ideologies behind the guns that worry me. I say, let’s keep the guns …
Caesar: True…
Huey: And let’s ban the conservative, imperialist, capitalist oppressors who make the world such a violent place!
Think about it! We get rid of them, and we don’t need the guns anymore!!
Caesar: You think they say the same thing about us?
  • Huey: [E]veryone is worried about kids and violence, right? And kids using guns – so why don't they go after the gun manufacturers and gun dealers instead of people who make video games, it doesn't make sense.
Riley: Sure it does, pretend your some stupid parents activist person…
Who would you rather start a beef with – some nerd who makes video games, or some dude with a warehouse full of AK-47s?
  • Control criminals not guns; criminals by definition are lawbreakers and will not alter their behavior in deference to a law. Enacting gun laws to control criminals makes as much sense as trying to require rapist to wear condoms.
  • One shot, two shot, three shots, four shots! All I hear is gunshots, this is where the fun stops. Bodies drop; hit the floor. Music's off; party stops. Everybody, hit the door! Somebody's licking shots off!
  • I was attorney general; my name is Meese. I say, go to college. Don't carry a piece.
  • Gun control has always been racist and discriminatory. The ultimate objective of gun control is to control an unarmed people by an armed oppressor.
  • No freedman, Negro, or Mulatto shall carry or keep firearms or ammunition.
    • Mississippi Black Code (1865)
  • I can't even think about this movie. I don't WANT to think about it because if I think about it I will have to face an ugly truth that has been gnawing through my head...
    This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed — without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! — I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?
  • I would like to graciously extend the invitation to the author of this tweet and anyone else from the NRA to join me at the hospital the next time I care for a child who has been hurt or killed by a gun that wasn't safely stored or was an innocent bystander.
  • Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have, shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer – its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins.
    • Robert Mugabe, as quoted by Martin Meredith in "Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe"
    • Said in 1976 while a leading commander of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army
  • As long as I have a pen in my hand and a revolver in my pocket, I fear no one.
    • Benito Mussolini, 1914. Quoted in Paolo Monelli, Mussolini:the intimate life of a demagogue, Vanguard Press, 1954.

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  • It is not generally recognized that when a high velocity missile strikes the body and moves through soft tissues, pressures develop which are measured in thousands of atmospheres. Actually, three different types of pressure change appear: (1) shock wave pressures or sharp, high pressure pulses, formed when the missile hits the body surface; (2) very high pressure regions immediately in front and to each side of the moving missile; (3) relatively slow, low pressure changes connected with the behavior of the large explosive temporary cavity, formed behind the missile. Such pressure changes appear to be responsible for what is known to hunters as hydraulic shock—a hydraulic transmission of energy which is believed to cause instant death of animals hit by high velocity bullets.
    • E. Harvey Newton, Howard McMillen;  An Experimental Study of shock waves resulting from the impact of high velocity missiles on animal tissues, Journal of Experimental Medicine, February 1947.
  • A gun is not just a bit of metal. There is a relationship between the person and the gun which develops and changes. It became something he (Hamilton) could show off, then an extension of himself.
  • There's one thing for sure; you can't kill sixteen children in less than two minutes with a club, a knife or even a machete.
  • Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.
  • And in my mind, I'm going, 'why can't I just shoot this guy in the spine right now? Shoot him in the spine, explain the facts of life to him?'
    • Ted Nugent, as guest DJ on WRIF-FM, Detroit, (28 September 1990); referring to an encounter with a Hare Krishna.

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  • The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside. And while a single nation refuses to lay them down, it is proper that all should keep them up. Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.
  • It is the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made. The particular states, like private citizens, have a right to be armed, and to defend, by force of arms, their rights, when invaded.
    • Debates in the House of Representatives, ed. Linda Grand De Pauw. (Balt., Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), 92-3.

  • Got a gun fact I got two

    That's O.K. man 'cause I love god

    Glorified version of a pellet gun

    Feels so manly when armed

  • The sense of impending conflict means business is picking up at the capital's 43 gun shops, even though they are only licensed to sell hunting guns or pistols. Customers are stockpiling bullets or shotgun cartridges, says Wiham Ghazi of the "Free Bird" gun shop, whose 12-gauge shotguns and .22 caliber rifles hang from gun racks on the wall of his shop, emanating a faint scent of gun oil. "It's our culture that people keep guns in their houses - it's inherited from our grandfathers," says Mr. Ghazi, sorting through an array of pistol bullets. Among the ammunition selection is a 12.7mm bullet for a heavy machine gun, with the red-painted tip of a tracer that burns bright as it flies.

    "People are buying these kinds of guns just to protect themselves, in case of conflict," Ghazi says, adding that one customer Saturday morning came in looking for bullets for his father's .45 caliber pistol, which had been "put aside for years."

    To explain their bond with weapons, Iraqis are fond of the modernized version of one traditional saying: "Give everything to your friend, except your car, your wife, and your gun."

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  • You don't need no gun control. You know what you need? We need some bullet control. Man, we need to control the bullets, that's right. I think all bullets should cost $5,000. $5,000 for a bullet. You know why? 'Cause if a bullet costs $5000, there'd be no more innocent bystanders...
  • When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, "I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with."
    • Will Rogers, as quoted in The Quotable Will Rogers (2006) by Joseph H. Carter.
  • You've never in your life seen a picture, I bet any one of you, never seen a picture of one of these old Pilgrims praying when they didn't have a gun right by the side of them. That was to see that he got what he was praying for.
  • A great many sportsmen have urged me to support this bill. It is hard for me to understand the interest of sportsmen in pistols. I myself have fished and hunted a great deal. I have a deep interest in outdoor sports and the various associations which foster them, but it is common knowledge, of course, that fishermen never use a pistol and hunters practically never use a pistol... [even for] theoretical self-protection, the value of a revolver is very problematical.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1931, opposing the Hanley-Fake firearms bill which would have increased access to hanguns. Quoted in Gun Violence in America:The Struggle for Control, Alexander DeConde, 2003 (p.132).
  • “Gunslingers are unimaginative men. If they had an imagination—” (and a brain, I mentally added) “—they wouldn’t use guns to solve every problem they come across. All they understand is shooting.”
  • For the purpose of securing the working class in the possession of complete power, and in order to eliminate all possibility of restoring the power of the exploiters, it is decreed that all workers be armed.

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  • The security of this country no longer is dependent on private gun ownership, and the weaponry used by members of the military is in no way dependent on personal gun ownership.
    Uncontrolled gun ownership does not solve collective security; it has become the root of insecurity.
  • I have a love interest in every one of my films — a gun.
  • Police officer: What are you going to do with that gun?
Huey P. Newton: What are you going to do with your gun? Because if you try to shoot at me, or you try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back at you, swine ... You come from Georgia somewhere, you're downtown making $800 a month, and you come down here murdering and brutalizing black people in the black communities. They gave you sergeant stripes and I say you're nothing but a low-life, scurvy swine. A sharecropper from racist Georgia in the South somewhere. So if you draw that gun, I'll shoot back at you and I'll blow your brains out!
Police officer: You ... you ... you ... you're just turning the Constitution around!
Newton: I'm not turning anything around. And I got my gun. What are you going to do with yours?
  • For pediatricians, talking with families about locking up their guns away from their children has become a routine part of well visits, said Benjamin Hoffman, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. When children can’t get access to a gun, it prevents a large chunk of gun deaths and injuries — accidental shootings and suicides.
    “Having access to a firearm for a child who is experiencing a behavioral health crisis is an absolute recipe for the most tragic things you can imagine,” Hoffman said.
    Even when children are not direct victims of a gun shooting, they may suffer from mental health blowback of gun violence, the report says. About half of teens in the U.S. worry about a school shooting. And in areas that have been exposed to a fatal shooting at a school, youth antidepressant use jumps by more than 20%.
  • If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.
  • “Strange,” he said in a conversational voice, “how, for some men, the possession of a gun acts as a powerful intoxicant. It destroys the reasoning faculties, eh, Carlo?”
  • The arms dealers were of especial interest to me. They commonly operated on street corners (some nights, in certain quarters, there seemed to be one on almost every corner) and offered a wide selection of handguns and ammo, the odd assault weapon—hardly surprising in a country where you could, I've been told, blow away a cow with a rocket launcher for a fee of two hundred dollars, less if you were prepared to haggle. I saw in them the future of my own country, where death was celebrated with equal enthusiasm, although candy-coated by Technicolor and video games and television news. When the coating finally wore off, as it threatened to do, there we would all be, in Cambodia.
  • What makes a man with a gun seem bigger
    than a man with almonds?
  • For men know that throughout all the prior ages of history the bottom line in male-female relationships has always been woman's need for male protection. Women could not live alone for fear of predation by males. So they lived with a male protector and accepted his dictation of their role, either as a condition of receiving his protection, or because he would impose it upon them by physical force, or both. Access to firearms gives women, for the first time in history, the capacity to live independently and apart from men in safety and freedom.
    • Carol Ruth Silver, and Don B. Kates Jr. (1979) Self Defense Handgun Ownership and the Independence of Women in a Violent Sexist Society. Archived February 11, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. North River Press: Hawthorne, New York. Page 24. (This book is hosted online by the Second Amendment Foundation.) (Retrieved Mar 24, 2015.)
  • Why would an ultimately factual question about the consequences of gun control laws divide people along ideological lines? Only if at least one set of people were more devoted to their vision than to the facts. This shows up when gun control zealots are asked whether whatever new law they propose would have prevented the shooting rampage that they are using as a stage from which to propose a new clampdown on gun ownership. Almost always, the new law being proposed would not have made the slightest difference. That too is part of the farce. A deadly farce. So is the automatic assertion that whoever engaged in a shooting rampage was a madman. Yet these supposedly crazy shooters are usually rational enough to choose some "gun-free zone" for their murderous attacks. They seem more rational than gun control zealots who keep creating more 'gun-free zones'. Gun control zealots are almost always people who are lenient toward criminals, while they are determined to crack down on law-abiding citizens who want to be able to defend themselves and their loved ones.
  • The grand illusion of zealots for laws preventing ordinary, law-abiding people from having guns is that "gun control" laws actually control guns. In a country with many millions of guns, not all of them registered, this is a fantasy and a farce. Guns do not vanish into thin air because there are gun control laws. Guns — whether legal or illegal — can last for centuries. Passing laws against guns may enable zealots to feel good about themselves, but at the cost of other people's lives. Why anyone would think that criminals who disobey other laws, including laws against murder, would obey gun control laws is a mystery. A disarmed population makes crime a safer occupation and street violence a safer sport.
  • Almost invariably, mass shootings occur in gun-free settings. Yet gun control zealots seem determined to create more gun-free settings. How often have supposedly mentally unbalanced shooters opened fire at a meeting of the National Rifle Association? They are apparently not that mentally unbalanced. They pick places where people are not likely to shoot back. A mass shooting at a movie theater a few years ago took place at a theater farther away from where the shooter lived than other theaters in the area that were showing the very same movie. The difference was that this theater had advertised that it was a gun-free zone. Who is more mentally unbalanced, those who are doing the shooting or those who refuse to examine the facts about what kinds of places attract such shooters? Schools and religious institutions are sitting ducks, and the shootings there have gone on until someone else with a gun showed up on the scene. That is what puts an end to the carnage, not gun control laws. People who are prepared to defy the laws against murder are not very likely to be stopped by laws against guns. Only law-abiding citizens are likely to be stopped by gun control laws, and to become sitting ducks. As for facts and statistics, the only ones likely to be mentioned by gun control zealots, including the media, are those on how many people were killed by guns. How many lives were saved by guns will never make it through the ideological filters of the media, the political establishment or our educational institutions. Yet factual data on how many threats or attacks were deterred in a given year by displaying a firearm have long been available. Seldom is it necessary to actually pull the trigger to get some thug or criminal to back off and go elsewhere, often in some haste. Are the only lives that matter those that are lost, usually because there is no gun immediately available to protect them, but not the lives saved because they did have a gun at hand to protect them? Gun control zealots seem especially opposed to people being allowed to carry their guns concealed. But concealed weapons protect not only those who carry them, but also to some extent those who do not, because criminals have no way of knowing in advance who does and does not have a gun. Muggings and rapes become much more dangerous activities for criminals where many law-abiding people are allowed to carry concealed guns. It can take a lot of the fun out of being a thug.
  • I could be wrong but I have seen your face before
    You were the man that I saw running from his door
    You owed him money but you gave him something more
    With a gun
    With a gun
    You will be what you are just the same
    Did you pay the other man with the piece in your hand
    And leave him lying in the rain?
  • What's the dirty little secret behind 'gun control' in America? Here are some hints. Working forever without pay. Whipping and torture. Buying and selling of human beings. Hate. Fear. Suspicion. Terrorism. These hints recall the evil days of slavery, and post-Civil War periods of rule by terror. Those who would own human beings as slaves created 'gun control' laws to keep the power in their own hands. They could not keep African slaves and their American descendants under lifelong control without making sure the slaves remained unarmed. Free black people had served honorably and with distinction in the Revolutionary War. Yet under a 1792 federal law, black men could not serve as part of the state militias. In Louisiana, slaves were forbidden to use a firearm even in self-defense. In South Carolina, slaves could not possess guns without a master's permission. Black persons, whether slave or free, had to have a license or a judge's permission before they could carry a firearm in Florida and Delaware. For black people, guns were banned entirely in several states. Florida laws empowered white 'citizen patrols' to invade and search blacks' homes for guns or other weapons. None of these policies applied, of course, to white people. After the Civil War, 'gun control' laws kept black people 'in their place'. Blacks had to obtain licenses to have guns in Mississippi and Louisiana. Alabama banned all guns in 1866; for blacks. Later, Alabama and Texas placed huge taxes on the sale of handguns, which effectively banned guns for the poor. Tennessee and Arkansas banned the inexpensive handguns which were the only types that poor black people could afford. South Carolina banned all handguns, except those for police and deputies. Those American 'gun control' laws worked; they disarmed most black people. The Ku Klux Klan and others could freely terrorize black families without fear. Unarmed victims couldn't shoot back. Lynch law ruled, and claimed at least 3,446 lives up through the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Gun registration. Licensing. Judicial permit. Police approval. High taxes on guns and ammunition. Selective gun bans. Total gun bans. Police 'gun sweeps' of private homes. Sound familiar? The 'gun control' lobby advocates all of these policies today. These policies historically worked in the past to disarm a targeted people. These policies will have the same effect now. Although the gun prohibitionists have dropped the race hate rhetoric, they use the tried-and-true methods of the slave owners and Klansmen. The same means must achieve the same end; control of the unarmed people. The slave owners feared that armed slaves would not long tolerate their condition. Modern politicians act like they have the same fear. Are we peaceful American citizens the modern day slaves who must be kept in our place? What do these politicians fear from an armed man who wants to defend his family from violence in a bad neighborhood? How does a woman who carries a concealed weapon while walking at night cause crime? Race-based 'gun control' is not ancient history. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed as a response to race riots in major cities. The GCA wasn't passed to combat ordinary street crime or gang violence; white 'liberal' racism energized that law. Makers, sellers and users of firearms can derail the recent law suits and destroy 'gun control' by putting the gun prohibitionists on the defensive. Make them explain why they favor racism-based laws.
  • The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.
  • Homer: Just give me my gun!
    Wiseguy: Sorry, the law requires a five day waiting period. We've got to run a background check.
    Homer: Five days? But I'm mad now! Oh, I'd kill you if I had my gun.
    Wiseguy: Yeah, well, you don't.

T

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I do not believe in shooting anything that cannot shoot back. —Harry S. Truman
  • Black Americans don't seem to care that their ancestors suffered like hell for the legal right to own and use guns. Not just in wars, but in everyday life. As slaves before the Civil War, blacks had no right to own guns. As freedmen after the Civil War, state and local laws, and outright threats from armed whites, kept them from carrying guns. That meant blacks were easy marks for ordinary criminals, for racist criminals like the Ku Klux Klan, and for political criminals that kept them disarmed and out of the voting booth. But over the decades blacks armed themselves, fought back, and eventually won the fight to own and carry guns like other Americans.
  • It has been argued that the perfection of guns of great destructive power will stop warfare. So I myself thought for a long time, but now I believe this to be a profound mistake. Such developments will greatly modify, but not arrest it. On the contrary, I think that every new arm that is invented, every new departure that is made in this direction, merely invites new talent and skill, engages new effort, offers new incentive, and so only gives a fresh impetus to further development. Think of the discovery of gun-powder. Can we conceive of any more radical departure than was effected by this innovation? Let us imagine ourselves living in that period: would we not have thought then that warfare was at an end, when the armor of the knight became an object of ridicule, when bodily strength and skill, meaning so much before, became of comparatively little value? Yet gunpowder did not stop warfare: quite the opposite it acted as a most powerful incentive.
  • I've got a nine millimeter, ready to go off any minute. So, you feel it? Because of the law, I've had to conceal it. If you fuck around you're going to make me reveal it. Hey!
  • Why are the feds worried about me clocking on this corner, when there's politicians out here getting popped in Arizona?
  • I do not believe in shooting anything that cannot shoot back.
  • The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.
  • He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.

U

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  • I don't believe in death row
    Skid row or the gangs
    Don't believe in the Uzi
    It just went off in my hand.

V

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  • See a gun is real easy
    In this desperate part of town.
    Turns you from hunted into hunter
    Gonna hunt somebody down ...
  • [T]he balls sent by this gun are not ordinary balls, but little cases of glass. These glass cases are covered with a case of steel, and weighted with a pellet of lead; they are real Leyden bottles, into which the electricity is forced to a very high tension. With the slightest shock they are discharged, and the animal, however strong it may be, falls dead.
    • Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, (1870), unabridged translation of Vingt milles lieues sous les mers based on the original French texts published in Paris by J. Hetzel et Cie. over the period 1869–71. Translated from the Original French by F. P. Walter.
  • Yo, peep. This me name be Gore Vidal. I is spitting rhymes about early history. Why homies give props to Uzis, not books? Ain't nothing but a mystery, aight.
  • A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

  • Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
    Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
    And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes.

    My father died many years ago now—of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

W

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A Winchester Rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. —Ida B. Wells-Barnett
 
We are captives of The Gun. The Gun is patriotic. The Gun is America. The Gun is God. Garry Wills
  • It was a constant pressure among white racists to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans, because they would rise up and revolt. The KKK began as a gun-control organization. Before the Civil War, blacks were never allowed to own guns. During the Civil War, blacks kept guns for the first time — either they served in the Union army and they were allowed to keep their guns, or they buy guns on the open market where for the first time there's hundreds of thousands of guns flooding the marketplace after the war ends. So they arm up because they know who they're dealing with in the South. White racists do things like pass laws to disarm them, but that's not really going to work. So they form these racist posses all over the South to go out at night in large groups to terrorize blacks and take those guns away. If blacks were disarmed, they couldn't fight back.
    • Adam Winkler Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America W.W. Norton (2013). Op-Ed: The New York Times, Charles M. Blow, “Gun Control and White Terror”, The New York Times, (Jan. 7, 2016)
  • A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies.
    • George Washington, January 8, 1790, First State of the Union Address [7]; part of this accurate quote has also been used as part of improperly altered statements on the internet, and a few published works, such as America : The Final Chapter (2009) by Jessi Winchester, p. 213: "A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." See also NRA edited version available on t-shirts: "A free people ought to be armed - George Washington." [8].
  • Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe.
    • Noah Webster, Examination into the the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, Paul Leicester Ford (1888), p. 56.
  • The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
    • Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases", pamphlet, Chapter VI “Self Help,” (1892)
  • I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense, and have acted on it. It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must act in self-defense against lawless violence.
  • Remember when she had Tom Selleck on her program a while back? She blind-sided Tom Selleck! He's a good fella, ain't never hurt nobody, but he's in the NRA, so she hates that. She was like, 'Well, you're in the NRA. Let me tell you something, Tom: guns kill people!' Do you believe she said that? On the Rosie O'Fatass show! She looks right at him and says, 'Guns kill people!' Let me tell you something: husbands that come home early kill people! Alright? The gun was just sitting there! If guns kill people, I can blame misspelled words on my pencil! Git-r-done!
  • In August 2009, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer was discussing a tea party rally in Arizona, where it's legal to carry an unconcealed weapon. She said: "A man at a pro-health care rally... wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip... There are questions about whether this has racial overtones, I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns." All that her audience was shown were a rifle and pistol strapped to a man's back. MSNBC concealed the fact that the armed man was black and did not show the interview he gave to the reporter. Brewer knowingly deceived her audience because an armed black man didn't fit the racial narrative.
  • If you take guns away from legal gun owners then the only people who would have guns would be the bad guys. ... Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs. You'd use a rock or tear one of these chairs out of the floor. Hey, maybe I've been watching too many Bruce Willis movies!
  • So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can't. We are captives of The Gun.
    The Gun is patriotic.
    The Gun is America.
    The Gun is God.
  • “People were allowed to own guns, and everyone did own guns [in the West], for the most part,” says Winkler. “Having a firearm to protect yourself in the lawless wilderness from wild animals, hostile native tribes, and outlaws was a wise idea. But when you came into town, you had to either check your guns if you were a visitor or keep your guns at home if you were a resident.”
  • Frontier towns with and without gun legislation were violent places, more violent than family-friendly farming communities and Eastern cities of the time, but those without restrictions tended to have worse violence. “I've never seen any rhetoric from that time period saying that the only thing that's going to reduce violence is more people with guns,” says Winkler. “It seems to be much more of a 20th-century attitude than one associated with the Wild West.”

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  • Last but not least, I must say this concerning the great controversy over rifles and shotguns. The only thing that I've ever said is that in areas where the government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it's time for Negroes to defend themselves. Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun. It is constitutionally legal to own a shotgun or a rifle. This doesn't mean you're going to get a rifle and form battalions and go out looking for white folks, although you'd be within your rights—I mean, you'd be justified; but that would be illegal and we don't do anything illegal. If the white man doesn't want the black man buying rifles and shotguns, then let the government do its job. [...] If he's not going to do his job in running the government and providing you and me with the protection that our taxes are supposed to be for, since he spends all those billions for his defense budget, he certainly can't begrudge you and me spending $12 or $15 for a single-shot, or double-action. I hope you understand. Don't go out shooting people, but any time—brothers and sisters, and especially the men in this audience; some of you wearing Congressional Medals of Honor, with shoulders this wide, chests this big, muscles that big—any time you and I sit around and read where they bomb a church and murder in cold blood, not some grownups, but four little girls while they were praying to the same God the white man taught them to pray to, and you and I see the government go down and can't find who did it.

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  • Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. And my dreams are the same. Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I am here to speak for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.

Dialogue

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The Doctor: Get out of the way! Rose, get out of the way now!
Rose: No. I won't let you do this.
The Doctor: That thing killed hundreds of people!
Rose: It's not the one pointing the gun at me.


Misattributed

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  • A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
    • Falsely attributed to Sigmund Freud.
    • This has been sourced to General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [9] [10] [11] [12] due to a misreading of a 1990 essay by Don B. Kates [13]. The quote is Kates' own characterization of a passage in Freud and Oppenheim, Dreams in Folklore, and not Freud's words.
  • The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
    • Falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
    • This has been sourced to "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson", asserted to have been edited by C.J. Boyd. The quote does not appear in Jefferson's collected papers as searched in Google Print. The name of the editor is also problematic: some volumes of Jefferson's papers were edited by Julian P. Boyd, not C.J. Boyd.
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