"A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand."--Seneca the Elder (54 BC-39 AD), Letters to Lucilius
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."--Jeff Cooper
"The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem."--Jeff Cooper
"It appears that the murder rate inside prisons is ten times higher than that outside prisons. It must be due to all those Kalashnikov rifles that are issued to prisoners upon their incarceration."--Jeff Cooper
"One cannot legislate the maniacs off the street--these maniacs can only be shut down by an armed citizenry. Indeed bad things can happen in nations where the citizenry is armed, but not as bad as those which seem to be threatening our disarmed citizenry in this country at this time."--Jeff Cooper
"The data from the 1990 Harvard Medical Practice Study suggest that 150,000 Americans die every year from doctors' negligence - compared with 38,000 gun deaths annually. Why are doctors not declared a public health menace? Because they save more lives than they take. And so it is with guns. Every year, good Americans use guns about 2.5 million times to protect themselves and their families, which means 65 lives are protected by guns for every life lost to a gun."--Dr. Edgar Suter, San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 1994, Opinion (p. A17)
"You might not know that peaceable, law-abiding Americans use their personal firearms about 5,500 times a day for self-defense.... Not that there are 5,500 defensive shootings a day, as the mere display of a gun and verbal warning to an attacker usually resolves the situation without any shots fired. In fact, private citizens shoot nearly three times more violent criminals than do the police, while wounding far fewer bystanders than do the police. The media doesn't admit this, but the NRA compiles new clippings of such incidents in "The Armed Citizen." "--Boston T. Party, Boston's Gun Bible, p. 32-5; statistics from Kleck Study
"According to the National Crime Survey administered by the Bureau of the Census and the National Institute of Justice, it was found that only 12 percent of those who use a gun to resist assault are injured, as are 17 percent of those who use a gun to resist robbery. These percentages are 27 and 25 percent, respectively, if they passively comply with the felon's demands. Three times as many were injured if they used other means of resistance."--G. Kleck, "Policy Lessons from Recent Gun Control Research"
"There's no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them."--Shlomo Aharonisky
"You can spout all the anti-gun noise you want. You can tell me guns are 'macho' and 'masculine', and accuse me of trying to be like the 'big boys' if I carry one. I don't care. I've been raped, and I've decided that I would much rather defend myself than sit back quietly and be 'ladylike'."--Julie Batson
"Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns.--U.S. Department of Justice, "Urban Delinquency and Substance Abuse," August 1995.
"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."--P. J. O'Rourke (b. 1947)