the timboucher experience

Just found this page with a huge list of historical quotes on firearms, many of which come from the Founding Fathers. I’m not a big advocate of the NRA or anything, but it always chaps my ass when people say that the Second Amendment was to allow for “hunting” or to fight the “English.” Yeah fucking right. George Washington, and all the rest were EXTREMELY up front about what they intended.

A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. — George Washington

Notice Washington doesn’t say anything about hunting, the King of England, or any other crap. And he doesn’t say “could” or “might” include their own government - he says “would”. Anyway, check out the million and one other quotes like this from other early founders of the USA. While I don’t necessarily agree with violent resistance, a lot of this stuff I find very stirring, especially since you never hear it spoken above a whisper. This quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is also pretty awesome:

How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt

My favorite quote of all time on this subject though comes from the Clash song “Guns of Brixton“…

When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?

Awesome.

UPDATE

As per the comments below, some of these quotations may not be true. I did consider this possibility beforehand, but that’s certainly the problem with quotes on the internet. It’s as easy as somebody typing in a quote once, attributing it to somebody, and then other people repeating it ad nauseum until the original source is totally lost. In any event, I always recommend not taking my word for everything and doing your own research. Toward that end, here’s a site with some alternate quotations on the topic which may be of interest.

• Quote
• Kids Getting Paid to Snitch
• Thomas Jefferson Quotes
• 2 nice quotes
• Two quotes that I found somewhere, liked and wrote down