Miscellaneous Gun Quotes

A lot has been said about guns over the years. Here some random quotes about guns, self-defense, and other matters.

If you know of a gun quote not listed here, send it to us. (But make SURE it's not already listed. Okay?)

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"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 you've got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a .38 Special in her hand? Yeah."
- Dr. Arthur Kellerman (famous gun grabber)

"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

"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
- John F. Kennedy

"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

"Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers."
- Attorney General John Ashcroft

"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

"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

"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"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

“Cogito, ergo sum armatus: I think, therefore I am armed.”
- Anonymous

"From his weapons away, No one should ever stir one step upon the field.
For no one knows, when need might have, of a sudden, a man of his weapon."
- Odin from the Havamal

"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