“My father often told me, “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” I urge readers to use less than lethal means when safe and practicable, but at times there is not a satisfactory substitute for well-aimed lead going down range at high velocity.”
Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 12.
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James Wesley Rawles 26
Survivalist-fiction author and blogger 1960Related quotes
"U of O Speech Cancelled" in The Ottawa Citizen (24 March 2010) http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/speech+cancelled/2718883/story.html.
2010
“No honest man needs more than 10 rounds in any gun.”
Ruger to Tom Brokaw of NBC News in 1992. ([Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers, Josh, Harkinson, June 14, 2016, May 31, 2018, Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/fully-loaded-ten-biggest-gun-manufacturers-america/]; [Magazine limits were first proposed by Connecticut gun maker, Connecticut Magazine, New Haven Register, April 1, 2013, June 6, 2018, https://www.nhregister.com/connecticut/article/Magazine-limits-were-first-proposed-by-11435654.php]).
“A gun. I had been brought down by a gun. It was practically comical. Cheaters, I thought.”
Source: Last Sacrifice
This quotation has not been confirmed to come from Himmler, its attribution to him on the Internet coming from some point before 2000, as in the Site of the Sentient quotelist http://web.archive.org/web/20000823073240/http://www.siteofthesentient.com/alltags.html
Disputed
On Heath High School shooting where a teenaged gunman killed 3 students at a prayer meeting at the school, on Politically Incorrect (18 December 1997).
1980s-90s
“Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”
Source: Bloodhound
The Inn Album, iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
"A Call for Prayer – and Action -- Against Violence in America" (2012)
Context: The mind and heart reel at the thought of the sheer evil and brutality that makes such horrific tragedies possible as the killings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Having lost a father and grandmother to gun violence, it is a familiar feeling to me, and I embrace the families of the victims in my heart and prayers. It is painful beyond measure to lose a loving father and grandmother to violence. But to lose a beloved child and the adults who were dedicated to educating the children to sudden, senseless violence in the midst of the holiday season must be a feeling that is beyond comprehension.