Pro vs. Anti-Gun Quotes

These are some of my favorite quotes I’ve come across and figured you’d enjoy them.  In regards to the anti-gun advocates, you just can’t make this crap up, or the interpretation of logic they turn to; I just have to shake my head and laugh.  It seems the anti-gun movement comes down to totalitarian control, or complete and utter ignorance to the world’s realities.  But hell, what do I know?  I’m just a Bible believing gun owner.  If you’ve got some quotes you like, pro or anti, share them below.

Jon

 

Pro-Gun Quotes

“A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined…”

– George Washington, First Annual Address, to both House of Congress, January 8, 1790

“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”

– Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

– Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

“To disarm the people…[i]s the most effectual way to enslave them.”

– George Mason, referencing advice given to the British Parliament by Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, June 14, 1788

“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops.”

– Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, October 10, 1787

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country.”

– James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789

“A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves…and include, according to the past and general usage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms…  “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, Federal Farmer No. 18, January 25, 1788

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.”

– Patrick Henry, Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778

“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. 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 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.”

– St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.”

– Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787

“The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like law, 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 history of every age and nation establishes these truths, and facts need but little arguments when they prove themselves.”

– Thomas Paine, “Thoughts on Defensive War” in Pennsylvania Magazine, July 1775

“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

– Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

“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.”

– Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 1833

“[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.”

– Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, January 10, 1788

“As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.”

– Tench Coxe, Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789

“Though defensive violence will always be ‘a sad necessity’ in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.”

– St. Augustine

“Without doubt one is allowed to resist against the unjust aggressor to one’s life, one’s goods or one’s physical integrity; sometimes, even ’til the aggressor’s death…. In fact, this act is aimed at preserving one’s life or one’s goods and to make the aggressor powerless. Thus, it is a good act, which is the right of the victim.”

– Thomas Aquinas

“A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.”

– Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

– Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book (quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria), 1774-1776

“I will teach my children weapons and warfare, so they might teach their children science and law, so they might teach their children art and literature.”

– Unknown Greek

“Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.”

– Pericles

“From his weapons on the open road

no man should step one pace away;

you don’t know for certain when you’re out on the road

when you might have need of your spear

– Havamal (a viking age collection of common sense)

“A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.”

– Frederick Douglass

“No Kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.”

– James Burgh

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

– Daniel Webster

“Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.”

– Author Unknown

“The philosophy of gun control: Teenagers are roaring through town at 90MPH, where the speed limit is 25. Your solution is to lower the speed limit to 20.”

– Sam Cohen (inventor of the neutron bomb)

“The tragic history of civilian disarmament cries a warning against any systematic attempts to render innocent citizens ill-equipped to defend themselves from tyrant terrorists, despots or oppressive majorities,”

– Daniel Schmutter

“If the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is to mean anything, it must, as a general matter, permit a person to possess, carry and sometimes conceal arms to maintain the security of his private residence or privately operated business.”

– David Prosser (Wisconsin Supreme Court justice)

“As a card-carrying member of the liberal media, producing this piece was an eye opening experience. I have to admit that I saw guns as inherently evil, violence begets violence, and so on. I have learned, however, that in trained hands, just the presence of a gun can be a real “man stopper.” I am sorry that women have had to resort to this, but wishing it wasn’t so won’t make it any safer out there.”

– Jill Fieldstein (CBS producer, Street Stories: Women and Guns)

“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.”

– Senator Orrin Hatch

“Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. … the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

– Sen. Hubert Humphrey

“By calling attention to ‘a well regulated militia,’ ‘the security of the nation,’ and the right of each citizen ‘to keep and bear arms,’ our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy… The Second Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important.”

– John F. Kennedy

“There’s no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them.”

– Israeli Police Inspector General Shlomo Aharonisky

“The great body of our citizens shoot less as times goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power. Thus, and not otherwise, may we be able to assist in preserving peace in the world… The first step – in the direction of preparation to avert war if possible, and to be fit for war if it should come – is to teach men to shoot!”

– President Theodore Roosevelt

“The ruling class doesn’t care about public safety. Having made it very difficult for States and localities to police themselves, having left ordinary citizens with no choice but to protect themselves as best they can, they now try to take our guns away. In fact they blame us and our guns for crime. This is so wrong that it cannot be an honest mistake.”

– Sen. Malcolm Wallop

“One of the arguments that had been made against gun control was that an armed citizenry was the final bulwark against tyranny. My response had been that untrained, lightly-armed non-soldiers couldn’t prevail against a modern army. I had concluded that the qualitative difference in firepower was such that all of the previous rules of guerilla war no longer applied. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrated that wasn’t true. Repelling an armed invasion is not something that American citizens are likely to face, but the possibility of a despotic government coming to power is not wholly unthinkable. One of the sequellae of Vietnam was the rise of the Khmer Rouge and slaughter of perhaps a million Cambodian citizens. Those citizens, like the Jews in Germany or the Armenians in Turkey, were unarmed and thus utterly and completely defenseless against police and paramilitary. An armed minority was able to kill and terrorize unarmed victims with total impunity.”

– Paul Hagar

“I have yet to hear anyone afflicted with the “gun control” disability dial 9-1-1 and specify, “Now please be sure to send the kind of cops who are disarmed. If you can’t do that, we’d rather you not send anyone at all to stop the men who are holding my daughter at knifepoint, because in this household we don’t believe that guns ever solve anything.”

― Vin Suprynowicz

“Make good scouts of yourselves, become good rifle shots so that if it becomes necessary that you defend your families and your country that you can do it.”

– Lord Baden-Powell, Scouting For Boys

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and passed on … or we will spend our sunset years telling our children’s children what it was like in the United States when men were free.”

– Ronald Reagan

“I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.”

– General Douglas MacArthur

“Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.”

– Unknown

“I would rather be tried by 12 of my peers than carried by 6 of my friends.”

– Unknown

“The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.”

– A. E. van Vogt (from the Novel “The Weapon Shops of Isher”)

“When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake free people get to make only once.”

– Judge Alex Kozinski

“If guns kill people then pencils misspell words, cars make people drive drunk and spoons made Rosie O’Donnell fat.”

– Author Unknown

“If you teach your kids how to shoot, when to shoot, what to shoot, and where to shoot, freedom will easily be maintained.”

– Erin Canales

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

– Clint Eastwood

“Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly “free” state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot.”

― Tiffany Madison

“The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose.”

– James Earl Jones

“There are hundreds of millions of gun owners in this country, and not one of them will have an accident today. The only misuse of guns comes in environments where there are drugs, alcohol, bad parents, and undisciplined children. Period.”

– Ted Nugent

“An armed society is a polite society.”

– Robert Heinlein

“There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

“We would just go out and line up a bunch of cans and shoot with rifles, handguns and at times, submachine guns… When I was a kid it was a controlled atmosphere, we weren’t shooting at humans… we were shooting at cans and bottles mostly. I will most certainly take my kids out for target practice.”

– Johnny Depp

“To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic.”

– Ted Nugent

“But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you … it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”

– Dalai Lama

” … the right to defend one’s home and one’s person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.”

– Martin Luther King

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

– George Orwell

“It’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.”

– Christian Slater

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again; poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.”

– D. H. Lawrence

“Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.”

– Alan Dershowitz

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”

― Jeff Cooper, Art of the Rifle

“The Second Amendment is timeless for our Founders grasped that self-defense is three-fold: every free individual must protect themselves against the evil will of the man, the mob and the state.”

― Tiffany Madison

“If a responsible, mentally sound American wants to own and AR-15, that’s their right. Besides, when the zombies come…okay, you don’t like the zombie thing. When the Chinese invade our country, who do you want to depend on? The over-extended police force and the National Guard? Or the next door neighbor who’s a former Marine and has enough guns and ammunition for your entire block?”

― Aaron B. Powell, Priority

“1. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better make sure kids can’t get guns.

2.  So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better find out what’s making these kids want to kill, fix that, and then they won’t want to use guns to kill teachers and classmates.

See what I did there? Which statement makes more sense? Don’t bring up politics. Don’t refer to statistical data. Don’t nervously look at your cell phone. Just read the two statements and be honest with yourself. We can do better. We’re smarter than this. WAKE UP.”

― Aaron B. Powell

“In the debate over guns, both sides are angry. The pro-gunners are angry at the ignorance, lies, and distortions of the anti-gunners, and the anti-gunners are angry with the pro-gunners for presenting facts.”

― Dave Champion

“…the people who talk most about the need to regulate guns are also usually the same people who know the least about them. Ask these gun prohibitionists about the Second Amendment and they’ll usually mention hunting or sport shooting.”

― Glenn Beck, Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns

Gun control means control. It means control for the government and the government starts controlling the people.

― Luke Scott

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

― Anna Quindlen

 

Anti-Gun Quotes

“To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.”

― Adolf Hitler

“When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly …. When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.”

– Bill Clinton

“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements …. They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”

– Benito Mussolini

“All we ask for is registration, just like we do for cars.”

– Charles Shumer

“We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights or ordinary Americans to own firearms … that we are unable to think about reality.”

– President Bill Clinton, March 1, 1993.

“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. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.”

– Adolf Hitler

“To all my fellow Americans who simply insist on hangin’ on to those guns … Two things: 1) Enjoy ’em! 2) Please keep them hidden in a safe, secure place where the young ‘uns can’t get at ’em (I’d suggest the same place you keep the textbooks on evolution and global warming).”

― Quentin R. Bufogle

“A gun-control movement worthy of the name would insist that President Clinton move beyond his proposals for controls … and immediately call on Congress to pass far-reaching industry regulation like the Firearms Safety and Consumer Protection Act … [which] would give the Treasury Department health and safety authority over the gun industry, and any rational regulator with that authority would ban handguns.”

– Josh Sugarmann (executive director of the Violence Policy Center)

“[T]he Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to own or possess arms.”

– U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals, Silveira v Lockyer, 12/5/02

“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.”

– Mao Tse Tung

“If I could have banned them all – ‘Mr. and Mrs. America turn in your guns’ – I would have!”

– Diane Feinstein

“Remember: Guns don’t kill! — The dimwits who insist EVERYONE should have the right to own ’em do!”

― Quentin R. Bufogle

“Until America, door to door, takes every handgun, this is what you’re gonna have.  It’s pathetic.  It really is pathetic.  It’s sad.  We’re living in the Dark Ages.”

– Sylvester Stallone.

“My view of guns is simple. I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned.”

– Deborah Prothrow-Stith (Dean of Harvard School of Public Health)

“I don’t care if you want to hunt, I don’t care if you think it’s your right. I say ‘Sorry.’ it’s 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison.”

– Rosie O’Donnell

“Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

– Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC

“I don’t believe people should to be able to own guns.”

– Barack Obama (during conversation with economist and author John Lott Jr. at the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s)

“How many have to die before we will give up these dangerous toys?”

― Stephen King, Guns

“He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.”

― Hugh Howey, Wool Omnibus

“One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander’s last meal.”

― Stephen King, Guns

“If you’re one of those delusional 2nd Amendment types who believes you and your trailer park ‘militia’ might need to take on the Army, the Navy, the 101st Airborne and SEAL Team 6; not only should you be denied the right to bear arms — but the right to your belt & shoelaces as well … ’cause you’re stark, ravin’ batshit!!!”

― Quentin R. Bufogle

“I don’t own a gun and definitely not only gun control, we should abolish guns, the personal guns. That’s how far I’m willing to go.”

– Danny Glover

“I actually hate guns. They freak me out. If you were ever in a situation in which you had a gun, that means you’re in a situation where you wanted to kill somebody.”

– Matt Damon

“We don’t have a gun problem; we have a math problem: ZERO GUNS = ZERO GUN-RELATED DEATHS.”

― Quentin R. Bufogle

“I have the right, when navigating the streets of Philadelphia – thoroughfares supported by my taxes – to drive, walk, or ride Septa unmolested by criminals carrying handguns. The streets of Philadelphia belong to the citizens, and we would all be safer if handguns were not allowed in these public spaces. The collective rights of the community to live free of widespread handgun violence outweighs the rights of individuals to carry defensive handguns against unknown enemies. The idea that disallowing handguns in public spaces will lead to a generalized loss of freedom is a fiction created by the gun industry out of economic necessity.”

– Kip Leitner, Philadelphia Enquirer, 2/26/99

“Our love affair with guns has nothing to do with tyranny, or militias, or self-preservation. Just ask any NRA member the following: If Jesus Christ himself were to come down off the cross and grant you one wish, would you opt for a world without guns — or the one we live in now? If every gun owner truly feared for their life and liberty, the answer would be obvious. But it’s not about life and liberty. It’s all about the sheer hard-on of owning a gun.”

― Quentin R. Bufogle

“You don’t need a weapon to protect yourself.”

― Bill Maher