What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long. -- Thomas Sowell

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns. -- Ayn Rand

Governments will always misuse the machinery of the law as far as the state of public opinion permits. -- Emile Capouya

It is seldom that any liberty is lost all at once. -- David Hume

When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty. -- George Mason

Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -- William Pitt

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. -- H.L. Mencken

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed. -- Niccolo Machiavelli

"Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial, destroy their ruggedness. Get control of all means of publicity and thereby: Get the peoples' mind off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and plays, and other trivialities. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance. Destroy the peoples faith in their natural leaders by holding up the latter to ridicule, contempt and obloquy. Always preach true democracy but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible. Encourage government extravagance, destroy its credit, produce fear with rising prices, inflation and general discontent. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a soft and lenient attitude on the part of government towards such disorders. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues: honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with the view of confiscating them and leaving the population defenseless." -- Vladimir Ilich Lenin

"A widespread position, held with religious fervor by many, especially in the media, is that because of [the militia clause with which the Amendment begins] the amendment guarantees only a `collective right' to have guns. Under this view, guns are available only when a person is in the militia (or police or military). Those holding this view believe that those claiming the Second Amendment protects any individual right to own guns are dead wrong. It may come as a surprise that all serious constitutional law scholarship over the past decade has shown the `collective right' position to be historically bogus."--Prof. Lucas A. ("Scot") Powe Jr., holder of the Anne Green Regents Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of Texas, October 1999 book review.

"A trait no one can miss in [Mellon Professor Emeritus at Claremont Graduate School] Levy is rock-ribbed intellectual integrity. He simply will not shade his scholarship to match his preconceptions or politics. His chapter on the Second Amendment perfectly illustrates this. With Origins Of The Bill Of Rights, he adds his name and credentials to the scholarship showing that the framers of the Bill of Rights intended to guarantee an individual right to possess weapons."-- Prof. "Scot" Powe in a book review of liberal Democrat Prof. Eugene Levy's book, Origins Of The Bill Of Rights.

"Believing that the amendment does not authorize an individual's right to keep and bear arms is wrong. The right to arms is an individual right. The military connotation of bearing arms does not necessarily determine the meaning of a right to bear arms. If all it meant was the right to be a soldier or serve in the military, whether in the militia or in the army, it would hardly be a cherished right and would never have reached constitutional status in the Bill of Rights. The `right' to be a soldier does not make much sense. Life in the military is dangerous and lonely, and a constitutionally protected claim or entitlement to serve in uniform does not have to exist in order for individuals to exist if they so choose. Moreover, the right to bear arms does not necessarily have a military connotation because Pennsylvania, whose constitution of 1776. first used the phrase `the right to bear arms,' did not even have a state militia. In Pennsylvania, therefore, the right to arms was devoid of military significance. Moreover, such significance need not necessarily be inferred even with respect to states that had militias. Bearing arms could mean having arms. Indeed, Blackstone's commentaries spoke expressly of the `right to have arms'. An individual could bear arms without being a soldier or militiaman."--Excerpt from Prof. Eugene Levy's Origin Of The Bill Of Rights, pgs 134-135.

"The core meaning of the Second Amendment is a populist/republican/federalist one. Its central object is to arm `We the People' so that ordinary citizens can participate in the collective defense of their community and their state. But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of the states or other collectivities, assertable by them against the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather, the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assuarance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of the individuals to posess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes--not a right to hunt for game, quite clearly, and certainly not a right to employ firearms to commit aggressive acts against other persons--a right that directly limits action by Congress or by the Executive Branch and may well, in addition, be among the privileges and immunities of United States citizens protected by section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment against state or local government action."--Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School.

The first right of every human being is the right of self-defense. Without that right, all other rights are meaningless. The right of self-defense is not something the government bestows upon its citizens. It is an inalienable right, older than the Constitution itself. It existed prior to government and prior to the social contract of our Constitution. It is the right that government did not create and therefore it is a right that under our Constitution the government simply cannot take away. The framers of our Constitution understood this clearly. Therefore, they did not merely acknowledge that the right exists. They denied Congress the power to infringe upon that right.--Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), June 6, 2000 US Senate speech

My guess is that if you go out and ask people, how many gun deaths involve children under age 5, or under age 10, in the United States, they're going to say thousands. When you tell them that in 1996 there were 17 gun deaths for children under age 5 in the United States and 44 for children under age 10, they're just astounded. There's a reason why they believe these deaths occur much more frequently: If you have a gun death in the home involving a child under age 5, you're going to get national news coverage. Five times more children drown in bathtubs; more than twice as many drown in five-gallon water buckets around the home. But those deaths do not get national news coverage.--Economist John Lott's January 2000 interview, Cold Comfort

"If firearms increased violence and crime, then rates of spousal homicide would have skyrocketed, because the stock of privately owned handguns has increased rapidly since the mid-1960s. But according to an authoritative study of spousal homicide in the American Journal of Public Health, by James Mercy and Linda Saltzman, rates of spousal homicide in the years 1976 to 1985 fell. If firearms increased violence and crime, the crime rate should have increased throughout the 1980s, while the national stock of privately owned handguns increased by more than a million units in every year of the decade. It did not. Nor should the rates of violence and crime in Switzerland, New Zealand, and Israel be as low as they are, since the number of firearms per civilian household is comparable to that in the United States. Conversely, gun-controlled Mexico and South Africa should be islands of peace instead of having murder rates more than twice as high as those here. The determinants of crime and law-abidingness are, of course, complex matters, which are not fully understood and certainly not explicable in terms of a country's laws." -Daniel Polsby, The False Promise of Gun Control

"In sum, measures that effectively reduce gun availability among the noncriminal majority also would reduce DGUs that otherwise would have saved lives, prevented injuries, thwarted rape attempts, driven off burglars, and helped victims retain their property."--Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86(1):150-187 (Fall 1995)

"The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government.... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind." -- Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

"If the DGU numbers are in the right ballpark, millions of attempted assaults, thefts, and break-ins were foiled by armed citizens during the 12-month period. According to these results, guns are used far more often to defend against crime than to perpetrate crime." Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms

"Some people choose to do evil. We have the right to protect ourselves from them." Joanne Kemmerer, a Republican candidate for the Ohio House of Representatives in the 31st district, Cincinnati Post 8-7-00

"Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people." --John F. Kennedy

"Over 30% of reported assaults occur during a home invasion, and approximately 60% of all rapes." Home Security 101 by Ron Dorman

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