As is well know, I, ah..regard myself as a religious man, yet I belong to no church. I'm an able soldier yet I abhor armies. I can even add that I've been introduced to hundreds of women but never married. in other words no one's ever talked me into anything.

I'm neither giving up nor giving in.

You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Dirty Harry, for example. Clint Eastwood was not a rogue cop. He was a maverick cop, but he was a good guy.

There's no such thing as a good gun. There's no such thing as a bad gun. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a very dangerous thing. A gun in the hands of a good person is no danger to anyone except the bad guys.

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States come under attack from those who either can't understand it, don't like the sound of it, or find themselves too philosophically squeamish to see why it remains the first among equals: Because it is the right we turn to when all else fails. That's why the Second Amendment is America's first freedom.