Quotes of the Day - guns

Some quotes of the day while we put up our Christmas Tree...

"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 band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States." ~ Noah Webster

"When we say "guns don't kill people, people kill people" we are not being trite or dismissive of your loss. We are expressing a core belief that is religious in nature. If we believed, as you believe, that people are fundamentally good then none of these arguments would be necessary. If you were correct in your belief then guns would not be necessary either." ~ Mike Adams

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military." ~ William S. Burroughs

"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

"There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. I used to think handguns could be controlled by laws about registration, by laws requiring waiting periods for purchasers, by laws making sellers check out the past of buyers. I now think the only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution." ~ Michael Gartner, former president of NBC News

"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." ~ Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book

"The provision in the Constitution granting the right to all persons to bear arms is a limitation upon the power of the Legislature to enact any law to the contrary. The exercise of a right guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be made subject to the will of the sheriff." ~ People vs. Zerillo

"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence 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

And this one - which is perhaps the most important as well as the most succinct:

"A government that does not trust it's law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is itself unworthy of trust." ~ James Madison