As President Obama is inaugurated for a second time, the biggest political surprise is that gun control is now key to his political legacy.
Apparently, the heart of opposition to new gun regulations is in the white community. Yet white people face far less daily violence with guns.
Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities.
I support gun control. But speaking honestly about the combustible mix of race and guns may be more important to stopping the slaughter in minority communities than any new gun-control laws.
Certainly we have to find some kind of warning to put on guns for sale. And that's not too far-fetched. But what I really want to do is take the guns out of the hands of irresponsible people.
Nobody with a criminal record would ever be allowed to buy a gun. All assault weapons would be banned, completely. And everybody who still possesses a gun license would receive mandatory education and training by professionals on how to handle a gun. After all, I can't drive my car until I pass a test proving I know how to handle a car.
Every day's a negotiation and sometimes it's done with guns.
I'm well aware when they fired the starting gun I was halfway down the track, but I still ran as fast as I could for 25 years.
Handguns are a public-health problem.
The only birds I know about are the duck and the dove and the quail, birds that you shoot. You're not really supposed to shoot cardinals. I don't know if I'd shoot this bird. It looks pretty mean. This bird might pull a gun out and shoot right back at you.
I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them.
The Asia-Pacific Partnership is a climate suicide pact. It is playing Russian roulette with six bullets in your gun.
It is clear that no one will achieve any kind of objective through the force of violence, and that no one will make Spaniards yield to threats of guns, whoever may be holding them
Drama is a gun that doesn't go off.
It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.
I think President [Barack] Obama is exactly right, we need to combat [gun shoots] because this really can become the new normal, but that`s really what`s been happening.
The issue of guns, as president [Barack] Obama mentioned, which is particularly assailant in Colorado, a very complicated gun story, and I think a political climate that urges people to take issues into their own hands.
Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk.
I can walk into a gun store in my town and buy military-grade weapons. You'd be shocked by the amount of firepower you can buy - 50 caliber sniper rifles and the same shotguns the Marines carry in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn't matter whether I know how to use these things - I can just walk into a store and buy them.
If I do get a handgun, I can take it to the sheriff's department, and in about as much time as it would take me to order a value meal at Wendy's, they will give me a concealed-carry license. There will be no screening at all to see whether I'm qualified to carry a gun in public - which I absolutely am not. That's one of the reasons I haven't gotten a gun in the first place: I don't know how to use one.
Part of why I was attracted to the idea of owning a gun was self-defense, and part of it was that I've been fascinated by guns since I was a little kid, and I want to play with them. It seems like a lot of fun.
I think that a lot of people who like training with guns are probably drawn to it not only for practical reasons, but also in that same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.
I am a southerner who grew up with and around guns. I own some still. My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10.
Whenever there is news of a terrible shooting, I wonder why America has so miserably failed to enact even common-sense gun legislation.
I loved my childhood. They had the coolest toys back then. Star Wars, Transformers, laser-tag gun sets. Toy companies have really gone downhill.
