Reading over some older posts, including Futo Inu's 'Pleasure Reading' and I bethought me of things I had read, that influenced me, alone of my family, to become an 'armed man'. I loved science fiction as a kid (still do) and I just remembered that the VERY FIRST thing I ever read on the right to keep and bear arms wasn't in any civics or history book, but in a series of science fiction novels by A. E. VanVogt, collectively called 'The Weapon Shops'. In these novels an underground, armed with advanced science, opposed a corrupt empire by creating impregnable gun shops with the motto: 'The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.' This was a long time before HCI and similar crazies ever came along...and I have just realized how much influence it had on me. One sentence, a lifetime of belief. Kind of makes you want to find the one phrase that will make your favorite anti see the light, doesn't it?
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An armed man is a citizen; an unarmed man is a subject; a disarmed man is a slave.
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An armed man is a citizen; an unarmed man is a subject; a disarmed man is a slave.