Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'!
L. Neil SmithMany individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange Days that a "dogwhistle" is a guy whose asshole is so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him.
L. Neil SmithHuman rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.
L. Neil SmithPossibly worst of all, from the standpoint of the dedicated enemies of freedom, the Internet is a world that libertarians - having been marginalized for three decades by the establishment media - have made their own, almost without effort. It's an alternative reality (unlike 'meat-space' we live in) in which - exactly like intelligence, bravery, or virtue - the human capacity for violence is not additive, and in which it's impossible to initiate force against anybody.
L. Neil Smith