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    Posted January 5, 2013 by
    neverfail10
    Location
    Northern Virginia, Virginia
    Assignment
    Assignment
    This iReport is part of an assignment:
    Gun control debate: Background checks

    Thomas Jefferson, and the Right to bear arms

     
    The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

    Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.

    I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

    “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” (Quoting Cesare Beccaria)

    The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.

    The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

    No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

    To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

    I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. (Back then!)

    When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

    I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
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