Equalizer

"People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic
rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's
the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even
an armed one, can only make a successful living in a
society where the state has granted him a force monopoly."

---from the Gun is Civilization By Major L. Caudil, USMC (Ret)

http://homemadedefense.blogspot.com/2009/06/gun-is-civilization.html

Thoughts on firearms from the Revolution

George Mason's Fairfax County Militia Plan, 1775:
"And we do each of us, for ourselves respectively, promise and engage to keep a good firelock in proper order, & to furnish ourselves as soon as possible with, & always keep by us, one pound of gunpowder, four pounds of lead, one dozen gunflints, & a pair of bullet moulds, with a cartouch box, or powder horn, and bag for balls."

Patrick Henry, 1775:
"They tell us that we are weak -- unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Three million people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us."

 
Samuel Adams:
"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can."

John Adams:
"Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense."


Patrick Henry:
"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 may have a gun."

Noah Webster, 1787:
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops."



Tench Coxe, writing as "the Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, 1788:
"The power of the sword, say the minority of Pennsylvania, is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from 16 to 60. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."


Connecticut gun code of 1650:
"All persons shall bear arms, and every male person shall have in continual readiness a good muskitt or other gunn, fitt for service."


Article 3 of the West Virginia state constitution:"A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use."

Virginia Declaration of Rights 13 (June 12, 1776), drafted by George Mason:
"That 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."


A proposed amendment to the Federal Constitution, as passed by the Pennsylvania legislature:"That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own states or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals."

The strongest reason...

Guns in our Culture

I found all sorts of interesting quotes on firearms when aimlessly looking around the other day, so I figured I would share them with you.


Israeli Police Inspector General Shlomo Aharonisky: “There's no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them.”


James Earl Jones: "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."


U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop: "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." - former U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wy.)


Paul Hager: "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, "Why I Carry"

Daniel Schmutter: "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, lawyer for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Jeff Cooper: "Hoplophobia is a mental disturbance characterized by irrational aversion to weapons, as opposed to justified apprehension about those who may wield them." Jeff Cooper, To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth

Sigmund Freud: "A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity." ("General Introduction to Psychoanalysis," S. Freud)

Senator Orrin Hatch: "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, Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, 97th Cong., 2d Sess., The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Committee Print I-IX, 1-23 (1982).

Diane Feinstein: "US Senator, If I could have banned them all - 'Mr. and Mrs. America turn in your guns' - I would have!" (Statement on TV program 60 Minutes, Feb 5 1995)

Mao Tse Tung: "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." (Problems of War and Strategy, Nov 6 1938, published in "Selected Works of Mao Zedong," 1965)


Ted Nugent: "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."


Laurence H. Tribe of the Harvard Law School: "The federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification." (2000 edition of American Constitutional Law)


and lastly...

The Dalai Lama: "If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." (May 15, 2001, The Seattle Times)