"Yessir cap'n tightpants"

Wyatt Earp, "Are you gonna just stand there and bleed?"

"Most people say "yes"; I just say "seven"" Nikki Sixx

"It may come as a shock to be told that (you) have never experienced that kind of society which (our) ancestors knew as the American Republic...." Americans needlessly "live in the war-torn, debt-ridden, tax-harried wreckage of a once imposing edifice of the free society which arose out of the American Revolution on the foundation of the US Constitution."

~John Flynn, The Decline of the American Republic 1955

"I aint got time to bleed !" - Blain

"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow...

For society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding." - Jeff Snyder

ETA: Source:
"Who's Under Assault in the 'Assault Weapon' Ban?", American Rifleman, October 1994, p. 53; excerpted from the Washington Times, August 25, 1994

I just sent this quote to my senator and representatives. I think they'll like it and I plan to send more. Daily. Maybe even twice.

"How did I ever miss this long thread started on Feb 17?" Pablo Feb 22, 2018

"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

-- Winston Churchill

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

- Marcus Aurelius

To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state's totalitarian reach.

-Jeffrey R. Snyder in A Nation of Cowards published in the Fall, '93 issue of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal of opinion published by National Affairs, Inc.

Classical republican philosophy has long recognized the critical relationship between personal liberty and the possession of arms by a people ready and willing to use them. Political theorists as dissimilar as Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all shared the view that the possession of arms is vital for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed by one's government is tantamount to being enslaved by it. The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only with the consent of the governed.


-Jeffrey R. Snyder in A Nation of Cowards published in the Fall, '93 issue of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal of opinion published by National Affairs, Inc.

While gun control proponents and other advocates of a kinder, gentler society incessantly decry our "armed society," in truth we do not live in an armed society. We live in a society in which violent criminals and agents of the state habitually carry weapons, and in which many law-abiding citizens own firearms but do not go about armed. Department of Justice statistics indicate that 87 percent of all violent crimes occur outside the home. Essentially, although tens of millions own firearms, we are an unarmed society.


-Jeffrey R. Snyder in A Nation of Cowards published in the Fall, '93 issue of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal of opinion published by National Affairs, Inc.

What we certainly do not need is more gun control. Those who call for the repeal of the Second Amendment so that we can really begin controlling firearms betray a serious misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people.

At one time this was even understood by the Supreme Court. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the first case in which the Court had an opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment, it stated that the right confirmed by the Second Amendment "is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The repeal of the Second Amendment would no more render the outlawing of firearms legitimate than the repeal of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment would authorize the government to imprison and kill people at will. A government that abrogates any of the Bill of Rights, with or without majoritarian approval, forever acts illegitimately, becomes tyrannical, and loses the moral right to govern.

-Jeffrey R. Snyder in A Nation of Cowards published in the Fall, '93 issue of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal of opinion published by National Affairs, Inc.