β
if i was a woman these days, i'd be killing motherfuckers. my handgun would never cool and my hands would be covered in testicular blood. i would have a horrible reputation with a lot of men because i would be calling them on their weak bullshit left and right.
β
β
Henry Rollins (Solipsist)
β
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.
β
β
E. Lockhart (We Were Liars)
β
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
β
β
Mitch Ratcliffe
β
I think life should be more like TV. I think all of life's problems ought to be solved in 30 minutes with simple homilies, don't you? I think weight and oral hygiene ought to be our biggest concerns. I think we should all have powerful, high-paying jobs, and everyone should drive fancy sports cars. All our desires should be instantly gratified. Women should always wear tight clothing, and men should carry powerful handguns. Life overall should be more glamorous, thrill-packed, and filled with applause, don't you think?... Then again, if real life was like that, what would we watch on television?
β
β
Bill Watterson (The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes)
β
I know what you're thinking," Grandma said into the silence. "Do I have anymore bullets in this here gun? Well, with all the confusion, what with being locked up in a refrigerator, I plumb forgot what was in here to start with. But being that this is a 45 magnum, the most powerful handgun in existence, and it could blow your head clean off, you just got to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky today? Well, do you, punk?"
Christ," Spiro whispered. "She thinks she's f**king Clint Eastwood.
β
β
Janet Evanovich (Two for the Dough (Stephanie Plum, #2))
β
I have a smoke grenade in my room," I said.
"What?" Megan asked. "How?"
"I grew up working at a munitions plant," I said. "We mostly made rifles and handguns, but we worked with other factories. I got to pick up the occasional goody from the QC reject pile."
"A smoke grenade is a goody?" Cody asked.
I frowned. What did he mean? Of course it was. Who wouldn't want a smoke grenade when offered one?
β
β
Brandon Sanderson (Steelheart (The Reckoners, #1))
β
We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββas the road around us
grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through the glass
ββββββββββββββββββββalready laced with frost,
but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out of
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββlullabies.
But damn if there isnβt anything sexier
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββthan a slender boy with a handgun,
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββa fast car, a bottle of pills.
β
β
Richard Siken (Crush)
β
He held up the AK-47, the muscles in his arm bunching against the weight. βThis is an assault rifle.β Then held up the handgun. βThis is a semi-automatic pistol.β
Then he gave a little thrust of his hips and looked down at his penis. βThat is my gun. As youβve discovered, itβs pumpaction like a shotgun , but it doesnβt fire bullets.
β
β
Pamela Clare (Breaking Point (I-Team, #5))
β
The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers' -- the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.
β
β
Edward Abbey
β
I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?
β
β
Clint Eastwood
β
He reached into his jacket pocket, as if looking for a guide book, but pulled out an automatic handgun instead. βDonβt do anything stupid,β he told her.
β
β
Jeffrey S. Stephens (Enemies Among Us (Nick Reagan, #2))
β
Sophos, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I'm hurt."
"I'm sorry," said Sounis, afraid that he had made contact with his wild swing.
"I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would you?"
"Gen, it's the middle of the night."
"I know," said the king of Attolia.
Sounis tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He was sitting up in his bed. The sky was still entirely dark, and he couldn't have been asleep for long. He suspected that he had just dropped off. The bare knife was still in his hand, he realized, and he rooted under his pillow for the sheath.
"Don't you trust my palace security?"
"Yes, of course," Sounis said, trying to think of some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard Eugenides laugh.
"My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts. Don't be embarrassed.
β
β
Megan Whalen Turner (A Conspiracy of Kings (The Queen's Thief, #4))
β
A handgun at two hundred feet is the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.
β
β
Lee Child (A Wanted Man (Jack Reacher, #17))
β
The human reached inside Wrathβs jacket and started pulling out weapons. Three throwing stars, a switchblade, a handgun, a length of chain.
βJesus Christ,β the cop muttered as he dropped the steel links on the ground with the rest of the load. βYou got some ID? Or wasnβt there enough room in here for a wallet, considering youβre carrying about thirty pounds of concealed weapons?
β
β
J.R. Ward (Dark Lover (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1))
β
Looking around the workbench Colin spotted a device that looked like a complex handgun. "What's this?" He grabbed it and started aiming it at various objects around the room.
That's a glue gun." Razor replied.
Wow! How's it work?"
It's not a weapon, Col. We use it to glue things to other things.
β
β
Michael Carroll (The Gathering (The New Heroes/Quantum Prophecy, #2))
β
But damn if there isn't anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills.
β
β
Richard Siken (Crush)
β
Sarah drops her spent handgun and grabs some crazy-looking lightweight machine gun, the kind of thing I used to believe didnβt exist outside of action movies.
βYou know how to use that thing?β I ask.
βThey all work pretty much the same,β she replies. βYou just point and click.
β
β
Pittacus Lore (The Fall of Five (Lorien Legacies, #4))
β
Although he was an ancient Viking, Viktor wasnβt βold schoolβ as the younger vampires called it. Viktor embraced everything modern, and that included automatic handguns with custom made wooden bullets and quirky sayings like, βThatβs right, bitches! Whoβs your bad-dy?
β
β
Mimi Jean Pamfiloff (Accidentally Married to...a Vampire? (Accidentally Yours, #2))
β
My husband ran off with his secretary. His male secretary. the only passion I have lately seems to center around buying a handgun. Unfortunately, I can't decide which one of us to shoot.
β
β
Kristin Hannah (Distant Shores)
β
I had wasted my life in the pursuit of a career, romance, financial independence and the best heels in town when it seems I could have done more for my self esteem with a .38 calibre handgun
β
β
Tyne O'Connell (Latest Accessory (Meet Me at the Bar, #2))
β
God, give me patience or an untraceable handgun, I thought.
β
β
K.J. Sutton (Fortuna Sworn (Fortuna Sworn, #1))
β
In the silent aftermath, I said, "We'll give them a second chance."
With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom in the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia's ruthless advice and I had failed. Gen's gift told me that I had not failed for lack of trying. I'd lifted out the matching gun and read its archaic inscription. Realisa onum. Not 'the queen made me,' but 'I can make the king.'
Looking at Akretenesh's startled face down the long barrel of the handgun, I smiled, until I felt the scar tissue tighten. That one expression, I'd never showed him. My face gave away my humiliation, my rage, my surprise, and my embarrassment, but I had never let him see what I looked like when I smiled: my uncle.
His diplomatic mask dissolved, and he backed away.
In Attolia, I had been in front of a mirror at last, and I had understood what made Oerus back in Hanaktos ask me if my expression was a happy one or not. The smile rumpled the scar tissue under my skin, and it dragged my face askew, giving me the leer of a man who'd never had a moment of self-doubt, who'd never regretted a life lost. I'd worried that I wouldn't have the nerve to carry this off, but in the moment, it was easy. Seeing Akretenesh recoil, I laughed out loud.
β
β
Megan Whalen Turner (A Conspiracy of Kings (The Queen's Thief, #4))
β
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila
β
β
Mitch Ratcliffe
β
As if some kind of demon were racking his brain, Curley Joe stood in front of the jukebox with a small, silver handgun still pointed at the hole its bullet had blown through the shattered Plexiglas.
β
β
Mark Barkawitz (Full Moon Saturday Night)
β
What the hell was she doing on the nonhostage side of a handgun?
β
β
Suzanne Brockmann (The Defiant Hero (Troubleshooters, #2))
β
In the cavity were two handguns with ammunition clips.
β
β
Frederick Forsyth (The Devil's Alternative)
β
A racist cop pulls over a black driver for little reason other than the fact that the driver is black and a recent robbery was committed by a couple of young black guys in a white community. The cop quickly realizes the driver is not one of the robbery suspects. He sees a man with a wife and two small children. They are not a couple of young punks. Still,he persists. Why?
βHe asks to see the driverβs license and registration. While locating the appropriate documents, the black driver respectfully volunteers that he is legally carrying a handgun. The cop panicsβis it the image of a black man with a gun? He barks out conflicting orders and then shoots the man
to death, in front of his family. Why? βIs it because the cop is an insensitive racist? Maybe he wasnβt trained or taught any better? Perhaps he lived a completely different life in a completely different world than that of the black man. In this copβs world, were all black men potential criminals, people to be watched, people to be feared?
β
β
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
β
From a safe distance, the man sat watching, thinking what a bunch of fools! Is this how Americans live? Walking around blindly, bumbling into each other and falling down all the time? But he hadnβt noticed what the Professor had noticed or he wouldnβt have been thinking in such arrogant terms. Before the Professor righted himself, he had caught sight of a partially concealed, but plainly present M1942 Sosso Pistol, an Italian made handgun.
β
β
Cece Whittaker (Glorious Christmas (The Serve, #7))
β
She was astonished to see that the boy with the handgun was crying, his face wet. If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.
β
β
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
β
The United States-It's nervous poplulation obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.
β
β
Ian McEwan (Nutshell)
β
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster then any other human invention in history...with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
β
β
Mitch Ratcliffe
β
7:15 Montpelier - excellent dinner. Would have been perfect if only I'd had a handgun for the other guests: 'Of course communism was always bound to fail.
β
β
Alan Rickman (Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman)
β
You are not a handgun. More like a pellet gun. Maybe even a slingshot.
β
β
Jason Jack Miller (The Devil and Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey))
β
Handguns were in-room weapons. Under expert control in high-pressure situations the average range for a successful engagement was about eleven feet.
β
β
Lee Child (Bad Luck and Trouble (Jack Reacher, #11))
β
Tariq snapped the magazine back into his handgun.
"Do you have it in you?" Laila said.
"To what?"
"To use this thing. To kill with it."
Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For you," he said.
"I'd kill with it for you, Laila.
β
β
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
β
Orphan Annie stood her ground. She had been raised that way in the Georgia canebrakes by a father who told her, βYou donβt back down, girl, not for nothin.β Jean Ledoux had been a crack shot whether drunk or sober, and he had taught her well. Now she opened fire with both of Drummerβs handguns, compensating for the .45 autoβs heavier recoil without even thinking about it.
β
β
Stephen King (The Institute)
β
Waxillium had seen some odd things in his life. Heβd visited koloss camps in the Roughs, even been invited to join their numbers. Heβd met and spoken with God himself and had received a personal gift from Death. That did not prepare him for the sight of a pretty young womanβs chest turning nearly transparent, one of the breasts splitting and offering up the hilt of a small handgun.
β
β
Brandon Sanderson (Shadows of Self (Mistborn, #5))
β
Unlikely a handgun any more because it was around that time that the CorpSeCorps was confiscating those, having raised the spurious banner of civic safety and thus effectively securing a monopoly for themselves on killing at a distance.
β
β
Margaret Atwood (MaddAddam (MaddAddam, #3))
β
The whole basement was empty. Victor drew his handgun β an FN Five-seven β because he knew heβd walked straight into a trap. A second later, the lights went out
β
β
Tom Wood (The Darkest Day (Victor the Assassin, #5))
β
Yet following the handgun confiscation in England, crimes committed with handguns jumped nearly 40% from 1999 to 2000. Violent crime in England now surpasses the US violent crime rate.
β
β
Charl Van Wyk (Shooting Back: The Right and Duty of Self-Defense)
β
I mentally built an entire lobster death tank just for him. With radioactive mutant lobsters. Poisonous radioactive mutant lobsters. With lasers and chainsaws. Would little lobster handguns be overdoing it? Itβs justβaaaaaargh! Such. An. Asshole. And he was never going to change!
β
β
Lila Monroe (The Billionaire Bargain (The Billionaire Bargain #1))
β
Where did you and your brother get your weapons from?" Meg asked Bo. "Our cars." "You drive around with handguns and shotguns in your cars?" Bo slanted a look down at her, humor in his eyes. "We're hicks from a small town in Texas. 'Course we do." She shook her head. "Wait till you see the arsenal I'll be driving around with from now on.
β
β
Becky Wade (Undeniably Yours (Porter Family, #1))
β
Similarly, Australia recently followed the path of President Obama and the Democrats, responding to a terrible shooting by banning handguns altogether. The results have been disturbing. Since banning handguns, sexual assaults and rapes in Australia have skyrocketed, because there are few things a criminal likes better than an unarmed victim.
β
β
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
β
The blond's booming voice was well-educated British, but his outfit didn't match it. His hair was the only normal thing about him--close cropped and without noticeable style. But his T-shirt was crossed with enough ammunition to take out a platoon, and he had a tool belt slung low on his hips that, along with a strap across his back, looked like it carried one of every type of handheld weapon on the market. I recognized a machete, two knives, a sawed-off shotgun, a crossbow, two handguns--one strapped to his thigh--and a couple of honest-to-God grenades. There were other things I couldn't identify, including a row of cork-topped bottles along the front of the belt. The getup, sort of mad scientist meets Rambo, would have made me smile, except that I believe in showing respect for someone carrying that much hardware.
β
β
Karen Chance (Touch the Dark (Cassandra Palmer, #1))
β
One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to βbugger offβ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.
β
β
Bill Bryson (Notes From A Small Island: Journey Through Britain)
β
The attack came without warning, in the pre-dawn stillness on the day they were due to leave. A series of solid concussions shook the walls and sent Simon scrambling from his bunk. Max thrust a handgun at him, which he immediately fumbled and dropped.
β
β
A. Ashley Straker (Infected Connection)
β
Syn was inching towards the back but hit the deck hard when bangs as loud as grenades pierced the night. He and Ro both flinched and gripped each other firmly. Day knew who it was. His fiancΓ©βs presence was almost frightening β even to him. Knew the sound of that overwhelming, chest-rattling firepower. The sound of Desert Eagle handguns. βYou hear that, Ro? Hang in there. Heβs here.β Day
β
β
A.E. Via (Nothing Special V (Nothing Special, #5))
β
I had an eviction notice and a handgun, but I didnβt make any connection between them. Then I read about the invisible hand of the market, and it totally made sense. I wasnβt getting enough work as a musician, and I wasnβt getting hired at different jobs I applied for, so it was time to diversify.
β
β
Barry Graham (One for My Baby)
β
Lots of us up for first run today,β Alfie said, in the bright sort of way that someone might say, Well, looks like rain, doesnβt it! when itβs sheeting down and youβve taken shelter under an awning with five people whoβve all got knives drawn, and youβre quietly reaching into your pocket for a handgun.
β
β
Naomi Novik (The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2))
β
Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.
β
β
Don DeLillo (Libra)
β
Criminals are motivated by self-preservation, and handguns can therefore be a deterrent. The potential defensive nature of guns is further evidenced by the different rates of so-called βhot burglaries,β where a resident is at home when a criminal strikes.16 In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, almost half of all burglaries are βhot burglaries.β In contrast, the United States, with fewer restrictions, has a βhot burglaryβ rate of only 13 percent.
β
β
John R. Lott Jr. (More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws)
β
One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a βpersonal shopperβ program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppersβ desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. After historyβs first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten.
β
β
John Scalzi (The Android's Dream)
β
Violence has historically proven to be the human race's most effective means of achieving resolution. Violence is the most reliable method to make others listen, or safely deny their demands. Not to mention that in many countries, the police who enforce the law use handguns and batons, wielding violence as a tool to make arrests.
β
β
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
β
In 1996, Britain banned handguns. Prior to that time, over 54,000 Britons owned handguns.70 The ban was so tight that even shooters training for the Olympics were forced to travel to Switzerland or other countries to practice. Four years have elapsed since the ban was introduced, and gun crimes have risen by an astounding 40 percent.
β
β
John R. Lott Jr. (The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You'Ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong)
β
A racist cop pulls over a black driver for little reason other than the fact that the driver is black and a recent robbery was committed by a couple of young black guys in a white community. The cop quickly realizes the driver is not one of the robbery suspects. He sees a man with a wife and two small children. They are not a couple of young punks. Still,he persists. Why?
βHe asks to see the driverβs license and registration. While locating the appropriate documents, the black driver respectfully volunteers that he is legally carrying a handgun. The cop panicsβis it the image of a black man with a gun? He barks out conflicting orders and then shoots the man to death, in front of his family. Why? βIs it because the cop is an insensitive racist? Maybe he wasnβt trained or taught any better? Perhaps he lived a completely different life in a completely different world than that of the black man. In this copβs world, were all black men potential criminals, people to be watched, people to be feared?
β
β
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
β
And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa
β
β
Ian McEwan (Nutshell)
β
widening a cityβs streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter crime. Just
β
β
Jeff Speck (Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time)
β
Just because Iβm a queer doesnβt mean Iβm a pussy. They didnβt ask, I didnβt tell. Semper Fi,β DeShaun said bailing into the backseat with the handgun cocked and loaded.
β
β
Stephen Woodfin (Last One Chosen)
β
The P-38 WWII Nazi handgun looks comical lying on the breakfast table next to a bowl of oatmeal.
β
β
Matthew Quick (Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock)
β
Wolf made a strangled sound, pulling everyoneβs attention toward him as he lifted a handgun from the crate. βItβs just like the one Scarlet had.β He flipped the gun in his palms, running his thumbs along the barrel. βShe shot me in the arm once.β
This confession was said with as much tenderness as if Scarlet had given him a bouquet of wildflowers rather than a bullet wound.
β
β
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
β
All this time I have been telling myself that the skills I have to offer continue to be of value. Now I wonder if this is so. It may be that the day of the so-called βgunfighterβ is on the wane. That soon it will be little more than the memory of a brief period in time when masters of the handgun ruled the frontier. A living dead man. That is what I have been for some time now.
β
β
Richard Matheson (Journal of the Gun Years)
β
When our citizens are determined to openly wear pistols on their belts to go shopping at Walmart, that signifies to me a failure on the part of the macho ideal. Ostensibly, the handgun is displayed to let evildoers know, in no uncertain terms, that this is not a person with whom to trifle. It then follows that the wearing of the pistol presumes a situation in which the bearer will need to shoot someone, rendering the brandishing of the weapon a badge of fear, does it not? It occurs to me that if we keep on turning to such βmasculineβ methodology to solve our conflicts, the only inevitable ending is a bunch of somebodyβs family lying in a bloody schoolhouse, movie theater, or smoking Japanese city. I guess we just hope itβs not our family? I donβt like the odds.
β
β
Nick Offerman (Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers)
β
Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns.
β
β
Tom Spanbauer (In the City of Shy Hunters)
β
We Should Ban the AR-15 (or Insert Scary Gun of the Week Here)!β They say that because the AR-15 is the only rifle they can name. When I was younger, they would have said AK-47 or Uzi instead, because those got mentioned on the news more. If they were arguing to ban handguns, they would say Glock, because itβs the most common brand and theyβve heard its name on TV a lot. Same principle. An AR-15 is just one
β
β
Larry Correia (In Defense of the Second Amendment)
β
Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed βnervous breakdowns.β When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, βYou drove me to this,β and then blew his brains out. The motherβs mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.
β
β
John Medina (Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School)
β
Arguing as a now senior SΓ»retΓ© officer that there was absolutely no reason a member of the public should have a handgun. And certainly not an assault-style weapon. They were only designed, and intended, to shoot humans.
β
β
Louise Penny (A World of Curiosities (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #18))
β
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
β
β
E. Lockhart (We Were Liars)
β
If intellectual capacity is a sniperβs foremost qualification, the number two trait is patience. We will take out any enemy we have to when the situation calls for it, whether that means using a rifle, a handgun, a knife, or our bare hands. Yet the sniperβs fundamental craft is not killing a person, but being able to get close enough to do so. Osman and I were on a classic sniper stalking mission: track, sneak up, observe, and disappear again, leaving no trace behind.
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Brandon Webb (The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen)
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The Audacity of Despair
"You can stand your ground if you're white, and you can use a gun to do it. But if you stand your ground with your fists and you're black, you're dead.
"In the state of Florida, the season on African-Americans now runs year round. Come one, come all. And bring a handgun. The legislators are fine with this blood on their hands. The governor, too. One man accosted another and when it became a fist fight, one man β and one man only β had a firearm. The rest is racial rationalization and dishonorable commentary.
"If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford. Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence β these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve. I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.
"Behold, the lewd, pornographic embrace of two great American pathologies: Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can't look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country. Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.
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David Simon (The Wire: Truth Be Told)
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1.Ghost hunting
2.Target practice: rifles and handguns
3.Rock collecting
4.Photography-south Carolina wildlife
5.Soap making
6.Fencing
7.Belly dancing
8.Tie dying
9.Dog agility course training
10.Crawdad racing
11.Bull riding
12.Worm collecting
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Karla Telega (Box of Rocks (A Maggie Gorski Mystery #1))
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The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemakerβs more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you.
In short when a Peacemakerβs bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you donβt curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette one-handed then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh.
Another thing about the Peacemaker: because of the very heavy and varying trigger pressure required to operate the semi-automatic mechanism, it can be wildly inaccurate unless held in a strong and steady hand. There was no such hope here. The hand that held the Colt, the hand that lay so lightly yet purposefully on the radio-operatorβs table, was the steadiest hand Iβve ever seen. It was literally motionless. I could see the hand very clearly. The light in the radio cabin was very dim, the rheostat of the angled table lamp had been turned down until only a faint pool of yellow fell on the scratched metal of the table, cutting the arm off at the cuff, but the hand was very clear. Rock-steady, the gun could have lain no quieter in the marbled hand of a statue. Beyond the pool of light I could half sense, half see the dark outline of a figure leaning back against the bulkhead, head slightly tilted to one side, the white gleam of unwinking eyes under the peak of a hat. My eyes went back to the hand. The angle of the Colt hadnβt varied by a fraction of a degree. Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety-pins.
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Alistair MacLean (When Eight Bells Toll)
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He didnβt simply dislike the dirty workβhe loathed it. But Yukon wasnβt the only one with an assignment. There was one job Gold needed to finish on his own. He drained the last drop of whisky and grabbed his 9 millimeter handgun. His work was almost done.
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R.J. Patterson (Cross Hairs (Cal Murphy #1))
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Gun-free zones don't deter criminals-they help them by providing a guarantee that they will not face any armed resistance. But they do deter the law-abiding. A faculty member with a concealed-handgun permit who breaks the campus gun ban would be fired and likely find it impossible to get admitted to another school. Bringing a firearm into a gun-free zone can have serious adverse consequences for law-abiding people. But for someone like the Virginia Tech killer, the threat of expulsion is no deterrent at all.
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Glenn Beck (Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns)
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Our guy has a property office, John. And I don't mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping an eye on, like Son of Sam's piece, for fuck's sake - a guy in there who'll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he'll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he's actually starting to scare me a bit right now."
"A couple of hundred kills to his name didn't do that?"
"Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night."
"You know," said Tallow, "whenever I'm in danger of forgetting you're CSU, you always find a way to remind me.
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Warren Ellis (Gun Machine)
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Even then, retailers learned early that shoppers prefer their shopping suggestions not be too truthful. One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a βpersonal shopperβ program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppersβ desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry.
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John Scalzi (The Android's Dream)
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Those of us who would follow Jesus are precluded from drawing the sword. We are people who love our enemies; who prefer to undergo violence rather than inflict it upon others; who reject every form of violence, from nuclear weapons to chemical weapons to Trident submarines to handguns. (...) We renounce war and violent self-defense, tear up the just-war theory, and embrace gospel nonviolence. We not only put back any swords we have, but we beat them into plowshares. The unarmed Christ disarms us. Christ's community, the Church, is a community of nonviolence.
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John Dear (Jesus the Rebel: Bearer of God's Peace and Justice)
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Gun buyback programs have to rank at the top of the list of mindless feel-good attempts to address a serious problem in the history of our republic. I once had a statistician from Georgia Tech study these much-hyped programs to determine their effectiveness in reducing murders committed with handguns. To reach a statistical certainty of saving one human life, he found, you would have to buy back about 65,000 handguns. That means that Atlanta's gun buyback programs have not yet saved a single human life. And yet you'll find no shortage of antigun nuts arguing that a life is saved for virtually every gun turned in.
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Neal Boortz (Somebody's Gotta Say It)
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Is this what I think it is?" Having returned his focus to his own crate, Kai held up a carved wooden doll adorned with bedraggled feathers and four too many eyes.
Cinder finished unloading the handgun and set it next to the others. "Don't tell me you've actually seen one of those hideous things before."
"Venezuelan dream dolls? We have some on display in the palace. They're incredibly rare." He examined its back. "What is it doing here?"
"I'm pretty sure Thorne stole it."
Kai's expression filled with clarity. "Ah, Of course." He nestled the doll back into its packaging. "He'd better plan on giving all this stuff back."
"Sure I'll give it back, Your Majesticness. For a proper finder's fee.
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Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
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Remember that there are only two safe places to store a gun: on your person, and in a locked, secured container.
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Grant Cunningham (Gun Digest Shooter's Guide to Handguns)
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While higher arrest and conviction rates, longer prison sentences, and the death penalty all reduce murders generally, none of these measures had a consistent impact on mass public shootings. Nor did any of the restrictive gun laws. Only one single policy was found to effectively reduce these attacks: the passage of right-to-carry laws, which permit law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns.
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John R. Lott Jr. (The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You'Ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong)
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IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DCβs editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.1 Batman had debuted in Detective Com-ics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsmanβs organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDRβs solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2
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Jill Lepore (The Secret History of Wonder Woman)
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Federal gun control of the twentieth century has made machine guns unusual and uncommon, while the absence of serious restrictions on the availability of handguns has given people the opportunity to choose them for self-defense. The scope of the Second Amendmentβs protections was not, in other words, defined by the original meaning of the Constitution. The protections were shaped instead by the marketplace choices of twentieth-century consumers, made within the confines of contemporary government regulation.
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Adam Winkler (Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America)
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eight out of ten of the officers she surveyed experienced tunnel vision during their shootings. This is sometimes referred to as perceptual narrowing, and as the name implies, under extreme stress, such as occurs in a shooting, the area of visual focus narrows as if the officer were viewing the situation through a tube. Christensen and Artwohl tell of one police sergeant who says that as a suspect fired rounds at him from his handgun, his eyes focused totally on a ring the shooter wore on a finger of his gun hand.
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Dave Grossman (On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace)
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It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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screamed all around him. Luke tossed his empty rifle away and pulled his handgun. He fired down the trench on his own positionβit was overrun with enemies. A line of them were running this way. More came sliding, falling, jumping over the wall. Where were his guys? Was anyone still alive? He killed the closest man with a shot to the face. The head exploded like a cherry tomato. He grabbed the man by his tunic and held him up as a shield. The headless man was light, and Luke was raging with adrenalineβit was if the corpse
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Jack Mars (Oppose Any Foe (Luke Stone #4))
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This is comparable to the long fought battle over the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) and a popular stance that automatic weapons should be illegal while handguns should be permitted. Similarly, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, fought a hard battle in the 1970s and 1980s over the First Amendment and his right to publish any material regardless of content as it was a matter related to the freedom of expression. Gun control opponents, such as members of the National Rifle Association (NRA), do not want to outlaw fully automatic weapons because of the βwhat is next?β argument, which can be a slippery slope.
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Dave Pounder (Obscene Thoughts: A Pornographer's Perspective on Sex, Love, and Dating)
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The time she dreamt that her throat closed up in seventh grade Social Studies class and she vomited a three-inch maggot, pale and bloated, writhing on her desk? 3: 21 a.m. The time a man stalked her on her way to 7-Eleven, whistling at her, and then cornered her in the restroom, produced a tiny handgun, and shot her in the back of the head? 3: 33 a.m. The time that tall ghost βa gray-haired woman with a floral skirt and double-jointed knees, both bending backward like a dogβs hind legs βcame lurching through Darbyβs bedroom window, half-floating and half-striding, weightless and ethereal, like a creature underwater? 3: 00 a.m. exactly.
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Taylor Adams (No Exit)
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exploded behind them as they sprinted from the burning building. Paulβs quick decision to destroy the rifle shack and all of the artillery inside turned out to be a great idea. It evened the territory, or at least prevented it from getting worse. With only one handgun, the convicts were limited in their scope and threat. Colin was out of the picture, at least for a while, locked away in his ditch jail until someone came along to roll the tractor off Charlieβs homemade trap. That meant two of the cons would be searching for them since Dewey would probably stay in the dining hall to oversee the other counselors. Ritch knew Dewey would not
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Ben Sharpton (Camp Fear)
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In my training in the Army, Iβd been exposed to a variety of weapons. Rifles. Handguns of all makes and models. RPG launchers. Iβd shot a fifty-cal a few timesβnow, thatβs a weapon. The fiftyβsΒ legit. So I think you can understand, Cordero, when I say that a sword was a little disappointing.
Sword fighting was fine in the movies, for gladiators or fighting trolls or whatever. But actually using a sword in combat? Nope. It felt tardy by a couple of centuries. Of course Iβd just been in an epic fistfight, but everyone knows fisticuffs is a timeless art. Point is I wasnβt thrilled about the sword, but it was better than no sword, so I rolled with it.
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Veronica Rossi (Riders (Riders, #1))
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The very worst strategy is to try to hide a gun. Children are remarkably adept at finding things that Mom and Dad donβt want them to find, and burglars make their living by doing so. No matter how well hidden you think it is, a gun thatβs not secured is an accident or crime waiting to happen. If theyβre not on you, lock βem up.
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Grant Cunningham (Gun Digest Shooter's Guide to Handguns)
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There were many factors that made a handgun either accurate or not accurate. The velocity of the round and the length of the barrel were the most important, aided or not by aerodynamic subtleties like the degree of spin imparted by the rifling grooves, which either worked well or didnβt, depending on the bullet. Precision of manufacture was influential, with careful machining of quality metal much preferred over casting from leftover slag. Not that anything much mattered at seven feet. A pore to the left or a wrinkle to the right was immaterial. The human face was a big enough target, generally hard to miss at close quarters, and the man-on-firstβs was no exception.
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Lee Child (Make Me (Jack Reacher, #20))
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With Herr Hitlerβs consent, he just passed a new ordinance,β the man said. βItβs a law called the Regulations against Jewsβ Possession of Weapons. Effective immediately, no Jew in Germany has the right to own, possess, or carry a gun. All weapons and ammunition in the possession of Jews must be turned over forthwith. Any Jews caught with a handgun or rifle will be imprisoned and fined.β βAnd?β Dr. Weisz asked. βIβm no sportsman. Are you?β βNo, Iβm not,β the man from Dresden said. βBut donβt you see? These attacks on our communities are just the beginning. Now Hitler is disarming us, and when we are completely defenseless, he will come for us, for all of us. Mark my words.
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Joel C. Rosenberg (The Auschwitz Escape)
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Let's put our weapons down, okay?" He raises his hands to show he's unarmed. His hands are big enough to encircle my ankles. I swallow.
To hide my awkwardness, I mime taking a gun out of my pocket and toss it aside. He reaches into an imaginary shoulder holsters and takes out a gun, putting it on his planner. I unsheathe an invisible knife from my thigh.
"All of them." I indicate under the desk. He reaches down to his ankle and pretends to take a handgun out of an ankle holster.
"That's better." I sink into my chair and close my eyes.
"You're deeply weird, Shortcake." His voice is not unkind. I force my eyes open and the Staring Game almost kills me. His eyes are the blue of a peacock's chest. Everything is changing.
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Sally Thorne (The Hating Game)
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At the other extreme, the consumption tax rate should be very, very high for any products that impose massive negative externalities. Consider handgun ammunition. Currently, one can buy five hundred rounds of 9 mm ammunition for about $110 from online U.S. retailersβabout twenty-two cents each. But each round of ammunition has a slight chance of falling into the wrong hands and killing someone. How slight? About 10 billion rounds are sold per year in the United States. There are about thirty thousand gun-related deaths in the United States per year (including suicides, homicides, and accidents). Assuming the typical gun death involves one round of ammo, the chance that any given round will end up killing someone is about thirty thousand divided by 10 billion, or three per million. Now, a personβs life is generally reckoned to be worth about $3 million, according to the usual cost-benefit-risk analyses by highway engineers, airlines, and hospitals. If each bullet has a three per million chance of negating a $3 million life, then that bullet imposes an expected average cost on society of $9. Thatβs about forty times its conventional retail cost of $0.22, so, by my reasoning, it should be subject to a consumption tax rate of 4,000 percent. This is obviously a rough calculation; it ignores the injury costs of nonlethal shootings (which would increase the tax) and the crime-deterrence effects, if any, of citizens having ammo (which would decrease the tax).
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Geoffrey Miller (Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior)
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Unlike determinism, fatalism does not proceed by contemplating the causal mechanics of the universe-the implications for human freedom of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics. Instead, the fatalist argues that his doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the logic of propositions about the future. In simplified form, a version of the argument might run as follows: If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it's false, then it is the case that I won't. Either way, it's the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won't do now.
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David Foster Wallace (Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will)
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The day you shot Scrooge, we had a nine stashed nearby. We knew that tension was building between us and you, and so we started to keep the nine nearby instead of the .380 pistol. So when you came up the road, after we finished beating that fella nobody bothered going for the nine, because it was only you one to all of us. But after you snatched that gun out of Geoβs hand and fired those shots at us, I ran back to get the nine. We had it stashed in a mattress through the shortcut next to where we were hanging out.
Then he asked me in a serious tone,
βYou know, each time I jammed my hand in that mattress to find the gun, I couldnβt find it? I was like, βWhere in the hell this gun is?β I heard when you were firing those shots at Franz, but I couldnβt find that gun. It was only after you left did I found the gun. Franco βCoβ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.
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Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
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Credit must be given where credit is due. European cultureβs politicoeconomic system is wholly at fault for the importation of weapons into our communities. We neither own nor operate any of the 922 gun manufacturers who, in this society alone, produce over 1.5 million legal handguns for sale each year. We had nothing to do with the 250 million handguns already legally in circulation. No, they do not force our youth to buy guns. But their cultural imperative of violence has created and socializes them into an atmosphere where fear begets violence and violence begets more fear and more violence, and the methods and tools for quelling those confrontations become an increasingly more destructive interpersonal arms race. Europeans know that the death of a young Afrikan male is not simply his death. It is also the murder of every coming, exponentially growing generation of Afrikans he was placed here to begin the procreation of. There
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Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti (Homosexuality and the Effeminization of Afrikan Males)
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But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newellβs mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the peopleβs self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, Iβve seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and Iβll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice.
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Roberto BolaΓ±o (2666)
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The good part about these areas that we were taking over, was that all of them had parks where a lot of guys were just hanging out playing basketball. So I used those parks to make a good first impression with my gun, then I followed up with a speech presentation. At the end of the day, we were able to win over the entire park, and eventually their communityβ¦..
It was as if these fellas from different areas were just waiting for this, because no one else was going around to them. No one else was telling them that they were needed, only us. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
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Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
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One guy brought his hands up like a boxer, pretty high, so I hit him in the gut, which was a better close-quarters blow anyway, a tight body shot, no extension required. The other guy crowded in like he was going for a bear hug, which would have been a reasonable move, but he didnβt get all the way there, because however crowded the quarters, there was always room for a head butt, which cracked in right on target, an inch of backswing, and a lot of fast-twitch muscle. He went down and I turned back to the guy I had hit in the gut and I popped a knee under his chin, and he went down, by which time we were about three seconds into it, and certainly noisy, but I wasnβt worried about Joey rushing in, partly because Joey couldnβt rush in, not through any kind of a normal doorway, and partly because even if he did, I wouldnβt worry about him immediately. Because I knew something about Joey. Bennett was doing OK. He had a thumb in his guyβs eye, and his other hand was crushing the guyβs throat. In the active sense of the word. His fingertips were right in behind the guyβs larynx, squeezing and tearing. They didnβt rule the world by being nice. That was for damn sure. I picked up the flashlight and waited until Bennettβs guy hit the deck, and then I searched the floor and under coats and came back with our original three handguns, plus four identical Browning High Power Model 1935s, from Joeyβs guys. The Brownings were all recent, with the ambidextrous safeties. Up for safe, down for fire. They were all fully loaded. But their chambers were empty. We had been safer than I thought. We shared them around, one each, and I took the magazine out of the fourth and gave it to Nice to put in her pocket.
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Lee Child (Personal (Jack Reacher, #19))