Firearm

"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."

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."

"It's not gun registration that produces gun confiscation and genocide; it's people who do."

"... [I]f forced to take a position, it seems that the Nazis were more pro-gun than the predecessor Weimar Republic."

"This Glock I clutch; in God I trust."

"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."

"Strapped up, ready to roll."

"Ain't hard to find, I'm in the street. Pocket monster in the club, murk your ass instantly!"

"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?"

"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."