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Guns made us free and have kept us free, one side says; the other side rejects guns as instruments of domination, lawlessness, and terrorism. The conflict rages on because both sides are right.
JAN E. DIZARD, Guns in America
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.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS, Painting and Guns
Some parents … say it is toy guns that make boys warlike…. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout “Bang!”
GEORGE F. WILL, Newsweek, Dec. 11, 1978
Freedom requires guns.
Firearms, like people, have ancestors, and the frontier guns were no exception. Just as did most of the men and women who carried them, these weapons had their early roots in Europe. We can trace their lineage back to the sieges of the walled cities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to a primitive weapon called the hand cannon.
CHARLES EDWARD CHAPEL, Guns of the Old West
We cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy -- for all the bombs and guns we may heap up in our arsenals -- than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country. Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source.
ADLAI STEVENSON, What I Think
As long as there are guns, the individual that wants a gun for a crime is going to have one and going to get it. The only person who’s going to be penalized and have difficulty is the law-abiding citizen, who then cannot have [it] if he wants protection -- the protection of a weapon in his home.
RONALD REAGAN, interview, Mar. 22, 1986
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to acquiring an understanding of the facts surrounding the gun control debate is the firm conviction of many on both sides that most of the critical facts are self-evident. Is it not indisputable that the availability of guns increases the homicide rate and plays a large role in America's high violence rates? How could the possession and use of deadly weapons NOT raise the murder rate? Alternatively, is it not obvious that widespread private gun ownership deters crime? The debaters begin with premises that are so thoroughly taken for granted that they never consider evaluating them.
GARY KLECK, Targeting Guns
All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
MAO ZEDONG, Problems of War and Strategy
A gun is not an argument.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Deal
Swords and guns have no eyes.
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