Firearms Legislation Quotes

There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semiautomatic handguns and semiautomatic rifles.

The Second Amendment was designed explicitly to protect weapons that would be useful in a military context.

A great many sportsmen have urged me to support this bill. It is hard for me to understand the interest of sportsmen in pistols. I myself have fished and hunted a great deal. I have a deep interest in outdoor sports and the various associations which foster them, but it is common knowledge, of course, that fishermen never use a pistol and hunters practically never use a pistol... [even for] theoretical self-protection, the value of a revolver is very problematical..

Who is the NRA anyway? They are usually middle-income people who only think of themselves, who want to have no government, really, except self-rule by themselves. I think that little cracks are starting to emerge in the NRA armor.

The gun lobby is certainly politically powerful, but it loses as many races as it wins.

I can't influence or impact where the NRA goes and spends money.

Our laws must be fixed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. We have to keep speaking out for common-sense reforms. If we do, we can beat the gun lobby and save lives.

Trying to establish a city as an island of prohibition in a sea of legal firearms seems an impossible project.

You probably couldn't have found much daylight between the NRA and the Disney company. They probably would've had had identical demographics for the people who really loved those companies.

Conservative values aren't really reflected in the radical values of the NRA. And the other idea was that the NRA is not what you think it is: It's an evolving, ever-changing organization, and it has not always been this radical, right-wing arm of the Republican Party, and that the history of the NRA is in fact really interesting.

Today's uses of the Second Amendment may invoke James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, but they have a lot more to do with interest-group politics.

The NRA isn't a boogeyman organization behind a curtain. The NRA is made up of millions of people who believe in the Second Amendment and the organization is very closely connected to the country music community.