Quotes

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms 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, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and punishment (1764)

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." George Mason, during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution (1788)

"The said Constitution be never construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams, during Massachusetts's Convention to Ratify the Constitution (1788)

"The whole of the Bill of Rights is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as
individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
majority has a right to deprive them of." Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society,
October 7, 1789

"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the
time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested
in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out
of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which
it was passed." Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12,
1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"These Sarah Brady types must be educated to understand that because we have an armed citizenry, that a dictatorship has not happened in America. These anti-gun fools are more dangerous to Liberty than street criminals or foreign spies."
Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor

"There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the people were not "brainwashed" about gun ownership and had been well armed. ... Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half-starved group of Jews took 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazis."
Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."
Thomas Jefferson

"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. Whenever 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."
Justice George Tucker, Virginia Supreme Court, 1803

"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."
-- Mohandas Gandi

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
--Benjamin Franklin

"I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States
come under attack from those who either can't understand it, don't like the sound of it, or find themselves too
philosophically squeamish to see why it remains the first among equals: Because it is the right we turn to when
all else fails. That's why the Second Amendment is America's first freedom..." Charlton Heston 9/14/1997

"Support for turn-in programs among government officials yields real political benefits, in the form of favorable press coverage and positive feedback from gun control supporters. . . . Nevertheless, these programs have no demonstrable impact on crime."
Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Aldine de Gruyter, 1997)

"Brady may not directly result in measurable reductions of gun-related crimes." (General Accounting Office, "Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act,"  Report to the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, and the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, GAO/GGD-96-22 Gun Control, January 1996, p. 8)

"Gun-control laws, like all laws governing private conduct, ultimately rest on the trustworthiness of our political leaders. Every lie or deception that government officials use to justify these laws undermines their legitimacy. The Clinton administration's record on the Brady Act seems custom-made to maximize citizens' distrust of Washington."

--James Brovard of the Wall Street Journal

"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." -- Louise Brandeis

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."
- Heinrich Himmler

"Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as
well as property . . . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them."
Thomas Paine, Thoughts on Defensive War (1775)

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." Thomas Jefferson, Proposed Virginia
Constitution (1776)

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom
of 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 bands of regular troops
that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States"--Noah Webster in "An Examination into
the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution," 1787, in Paul Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the
Constitution of the United States, at p. 56 (New York, 1888)

"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."
Orrin Hatch, 1982 Senate Report

"Congress have 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 government, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the
hands of the people" --Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788

"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."
Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session ( February 1982 )

"To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm . . . is an unwarranted restriction upon
the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot
unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and
gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege." [Wilson v. State, 33 Ark. 557,
at 560, 34 Am. Rep. 52, at 54 (1878)]

"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun.
Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins."
Sammy "the Bull" Gravano (formerly of the Mafia) in a Vanity Fair interview.

"The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to `the people' not `the states.' ... `[T]he people' at the core of the
Second Amendment are the same `people' at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely citizens."
Akil Amar, Professor of Law, Yale University

"....a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of the means to effectively defend themselves is not civilized but barbarous, becoming an accomplice of murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing its totalitarian nature by its tacit admission that the disorganized, random havoc created by criminals is far less a threat than are men and women who believe themselves free and independent, and act accordingly."
Jeffrey R. Snyder, "A Nation of Cowards"

"Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power."
Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1992.

"One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without
resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms."
-- Constitutional scholar Joseph Story, 1840

"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered
Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed
their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so."
-- Hitler, April 11 1942

"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation
that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the
difference between having our arms in possession and under our
direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our
defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can
they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own
hands?"--Patrick Henry, 3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State
Conventions 45, 2d Ed. Philadelphia, 1836

"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. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny which gave rise to the Second Amendment will ever be a major danger to our nation, the 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, April 1960

"The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the Americans' freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the Citizen of his plight."
John F. Kennedy, Columbia University, 10 days before his assissination

"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, where the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
- L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better
than the animating contest of freedom...go home from us in peace. We
ask not your counsels nor arms. May your chains set lightly upon you
and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."- Samuel
Adams; 1776

" The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time." - United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 59 S.Ct. 816 (1939)

"What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?... Fight, and you may die, run and you'll live, at least a while. And dying, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that, for just one chance, one chance, to tell our enemies, that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our FREEDOM!!!"  --Mel Gibson as William Wallace in Braveheart