Noam Chomsky Quotes About Guns

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  Noam Chomsky Quotes About Guns

  
  

  Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

  Noam Chomsky

  Gun, Hands, Doe

  Source: chomsky.info 

  
  

• What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, War, Gun

  Institute Professor Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky (2010). “American Power and the New Mandarins”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

  
  

• I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is.

  Noam Chomsky

  Christian, Children, Crazy

  Source: www.iww.org 

  
  

• That's a large part of the source of the gun culture. You have to have a gun when you go into Starbucks, because who knows what's going to happen. It just doesn't happen in other countries.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Gun, Culture

  Source: www.counterpunch.org 

  
  

• There's something deeply rooted in American culture. You can pretty much identify what it was. You take a look at the history. It was internal conquest. You had to defend yourself against what the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened figure, called the attacks of the "merciless Indian savages," whose known way of warfare was torture and destruction. Also you had a slave population, you had to protect yourself against them. You needed guns.

  Noam Chomsky

  Gun, Independence, Population

  Source: www.counterpunch.org 

  
  

• In southern culture, possession of a gun became kind of a sign of manhood, not just because of slaves but other white men. If you had a gun, you're not going to push me around. You know, I'm not one of those guys you can kick in the face.

  Noam Chomsky

  Gun, Men, White Man

  Source: www.counterpunch.org 

  
  

• In the mid to late nineteenth century, the gun manufacturers recognized that they had a limited market. Remember that this is a capitalist society, you've got to expand your market. They were selling guns to the military. That's a pretty limited market. What about all the rest of the people? So what started was all kinds of fantastic stories about Wyatt Earp and the gunmen and the Wild West, how exciting it was to have these guys with guns defending themselves against all sorts of things.

  Noam Chomsky

  Military, Gun, People

  Source: www.counterpunch.org 

  
  

• That's a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it's kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I'm using the gun even if I don't shoot. Well that's nuclear weapons - essential to post-war deterrence - they cast a shadow over everything.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Gun, Years

  Source: www.counterpunch.org 

  
  

• If you look at say, England and Germany a century ago, which had the most advanced navies then, they were dealing with extremely tricky technological problems. Putting a huge gun on a moving platform and ensuring that it could hit another moving target was one of the hardest technical problems of the early twentieth century.

  Noam Chomsky

  Moving, Gun, Navy

  Source: www.madre.org 

  
  

• You can read it in history books now, but they often suppress the fact that the U.S. government tolerated [Nazi]. It's really remarkable because they claim that [Franklin] Roosevelt was impeded by the Neutrality Act. On the other hand, he bitterly condemned a Mexican businessman for sending several guns to the Republic. If you look back, oil was the one commodity that [Francisco] Franco could not receive from the Germans and the Italians, so that was quite significant.

  Noam Chomsky

  Book, Gun, Government

  Source: thehumanist.com 

  
  

• Half of the [USA] population, roughly, thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago. Two thirds of the country is expecting the second coming of Christ. They've also had to turn to nativists. The gun culture in the United States, which is out of control, is party fueled by people who think 'we've got to have our guns to protect ourselves.'

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Couple, Party

  Source: www.truth-out.org