All Quotes

"And I swear that I don't have a gun. No, I don't have a gun. No, I don't have a gun"

"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."

"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word."

"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."

"Coming out the slums! It's the hoodlums, I'm pulling my gat out on all you bums!"

"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."

"Bloody war! What do you think all these bullets and all these guns're made for?"

"I wanted peace, but now my piece is clearing out the block."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun. Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"fire flashes from the gun like a flower that blooms madness"

"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."

"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."

"You see in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig."