We cannot make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free.

Politicians pass laws for gun-free school zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them, and in doing so, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.

We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work —and by that I mean armed security.

Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we've got to keep generating it or the lights go out.

Laws can't control the lawless.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school - and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

If [the shooting of Gabby Giffords in] Tucson tells us anything at all, it tells us this: Government has failed.