"It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us."

"The majority falls prey to the delusion--popular in some circles--that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth--born of experience--is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out."

"All too many of the great tragedies of history--Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few--were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations."

"Many could have been avoided or mitigated had the perpetrators known that their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece"

"If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars."

"The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it--and is just as likely to succeed."