After the school shooting in Newton, Connecticut, several politicians, including President Obama, have suggested that stricter gun control laws are necessary. Here are a bunch of quotations to challenge their statements:
Thomas Jefferson:
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in Government.
Walter E. Williams:
The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.
Phillip Van Cleave:
When seconds count between living or dying, the police are only minutes away.
William S. Burroughs:
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.
Plato:
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
Alan Eppers:
Dangerous laws created by well intentioned people today can be used by dangerous people with evil intentions tomorrow.
Robert H. Jackson:
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
Paul Harvey Aurandt:
They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?
Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman:
Never Forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn’t allow him to do if you were equipped to prevent it.
Swiss Economist 
The single greatest predictor of loss of life in a lone gunman scenario is the presence or absence of lawfully armed civilians in the target area. If there had been one staff member at that school who kept a gun in his or her office and knew how to use it, many lives could have been saved.
This did not happen in spite of Connecticut’s strict gun control laws, it happened because of them.
[…] Furthermore, there are profound philosophical and political reasons why gun control is not the answer. The Swiss Economist does a good job highlighting (some of) these reasons through a series of quotati…. […]
[…] days ago, I presented a bunch of quotations on gun control. Over Christmas, however, I found a whole article to summarize much of what I thought. The article […]