Firearm

"Games today are very, very real," Zelk says. "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."

"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.”"

"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!"

"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."

"Americans' desire for a certain gun is elementary: if cops use a gun or if a weapon's availability is threatened, people demand the gun."

"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."

"See a gun is real easy In this desperate part of town. Turns you from hunted into hunter Gonna hunt somebody down ..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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?'"

"There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?"

"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."

"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.""

"The more people know that members of our community may be armed, the less likely they will be to single us out for attack."

"There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."

"How many alcohol related deaths a year? 100,000? That's, what, 270 a day? Tragedy. How many firearms related deaths a year? 11,000? That comes out to a measly 30 a day!"

"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.""

"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."

"“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."

"I have a love interest in every one of my films — a gun."

"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."

"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."

"I pull my trigger back; the bullets go. Boom, boom, boom! Now, I'm on death row. Fuck it."

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

"You gotta shoot straight! Straight doesn't seem good enough!"

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

"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."

"Not very sporting to fire on an unarmed opponent. I thought you were supposed to be good. Aren't you the... "good" man?"

"The report would be "routine retirement of a Replicant", which didn't make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back. There it was again... feeling in myself... for her... for Rachael."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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"

"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."

"A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders."

"Come on, Hector: the MAC-10 submachine gun was practically designed for housewives."

"Guns are the Crutches of the Impotent."

"I have a very strict gun control policy: if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it."

"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..."

"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."

"Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not."

"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."

"Armed men don't sit down and talk."

"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?"