Shootings Quotes

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

In one area in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes. In Greece 220 men of one village have been shot. In France there are extensive shootings while I write. Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time? How can anyone know these things and still walk around free? ~ Helmuth James Graf Von Moltke

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers. ~ Cornell Woolrich

I didn't react visually. This girl came up and knelt over the body and let out a God-awful scream that made me click the camera. (On photographing Mary Vecchio with slain student Jeffery Miller during the shootings of students at Kent State, April, 1970.) ~ John Filo

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live.

Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence.

The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know - all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is mea ~ Clint Smith

Certainly we're going to continue to see those commercials that I call 30-second drive-by shootings. And they're going to have a lot of money to do it. But we're going to combat it. ~ Tom Barrett

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. ~ Matthew Yglesias

I don't get debate agains guns at all. Because we have it after every mass shooting. And now a terror attack. And the proposals that are talked about almost always have nothing to do with this specific event. ~ Chuck Todd

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before.

But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up.

Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false.

Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear.

That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept? ~ J. Michael Straczynski

There's been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerously mentally ill. ~ Ann Coulter

Arguments that we will never stop all shootings by restricting access to such weapons fails to account for our strong and common desire at least to stop many of them - or any of them. ~ George Takei

The ban on assault weapons has decreased gun violence in Baltimore not one iota. That's because few, if any, of the shootings were done with assault weapons. ~ Gregory Kane

Minutes after the shootings, everybody's cell phone rang. ~ Francine Prose

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas - one aged thirteen, the other eleven - set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others. ~ Brooks Brown

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges. ~ Frank Delaney

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said - it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness - this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really - tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too - the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys. ~ Wally Lamb

Every single time I get sent to her, she asks me questions that sound like they came from some "How to Talk to Statistical Black Children Who Come to Your Office Often" handbook.

How is your home life? (None of your business.)

Have you witnessed any traumatic events lately, such as shootings? (Just because I live in the "ghetto" doesn't mean I dodge bullets every day.)

Are you struggling to come to terms with your father's murder? (It was twelve years ago. I barely remember him or it.)

Are you struggling to come to terms with your mother's addiction? (She's been clean for eight years. She's only addicted to soap operas these days.)

What's good with you, homegirl, nah'mean? (Okay, she hasn't said that, but give her time.) ~ Angie Thomas

Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants. ~ Ted Turner

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their eyes and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why - fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating. ~ Dave Cullen

I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America with genocide, then built it with slaves. The shootings will continue. It's who we are. ~ Michael Moore

The voices of peace can't be silenced by bombs, shootings, sieges, brutality and barbarism. Despite the challenges we face as peace-makers in a troubled region, all we want is peace and our campaign #WeWantPeace continues. ~ Widad Akreyi

It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. ~ Jay-Z

My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick. ~ Raymond Chandler

An estimated 9,000 American citizens are killed every year by illegal aliens. That's 25 American citizens per day killed by illegal aliens, averaging 12 by stabbings and shootings and 13 by DUI and related crimes. ~ Russell Pearce

Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States. ~ Walter E. Williams

The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them. ~ Thomas Sowell

There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. ~ John F. Kerry

If guns don't kill people, why do mass killers arm themselves with guns? ~ DaShanne Stokes

Best to become invisible
in times like these.
Everybody knows that. ~ Jason Reynolds

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn't be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn't require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn't have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn't care
about "aim," it doesn't

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had "one" student who

opened a door and died?
That's wrong.

There were many.
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the ~ Matthew Olzmann

How many more school shootings do we need before we start talking about this as a social problem, and not merely a random collection of isolated incidents? ~ Jackson Katz

Guns kill far more quickly and efficiently than knives, or crossbows, or toenail clippers; and, unlike bombs, you don't need to build one in your basement
they come ready-made! There's a reason why guns are the overwhelming weapon of choice among mass murderers. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other's blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven's love. ~ Aberjhani

Life is about love and as a country that stands united, we lose in the battle that we call love. ~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

Just think, if you had a gun" he said to her "This story might have a different ending. ~ Joe Hill

If what she is saying is true, then the rest of the world is numb, and we who suffer from ailments of the psyche are the ones who are more advanced in nature. We see the decaying of society, the neglect of morals and human decency: the school shootings, the crimes humans commit against one another, the crimes we commit against ourselves; and we react to them in a way that is more intense than everyone else. Yes, I think. Yes, this is the truth. ~ Tarryn Fisher

We've had drive-by shootings. I've been spat on, slapped, shot at. One guy tried to stab me with a broken beer bottle. But the way we look at it, if people do the worst they can, we'll still wake up in glory. ~ Troy Perry

If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world. ~ Adrian McKinty

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it "won't work and is a violation of rights," we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that's not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money.

Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won't.

However you feel about guns and their place in America - whether we're talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between - it's undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be "the last chance before the government bans" whatever gun manufacturers are peddlin ~ Trae Crowder

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. ~ Steven Pinker

Why ban guns? Let's give everyone rocket launchers! What could possibly go wrong? ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial-like the popular strategy of suasion-is suicidal. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

For every fatal shooting, there are about 3 non-fatal shootings. Folks, this is unacceptable in America. ~ George W. Bush

School shootings were invented by blacks ... and stolen by the white man. ~ Chris Rock

How does a mentally challenged eighteen-year-old obtain an AK 47 and a Lugar? We don't need to disarm America to prevent school shootings. We need only common sense. ~ Mark M. Bello

When nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11, it was enough to create massive change in our society. Over ten times as many people die from guns each year. Where is the social change? ~ DaShanne Stokes

Respecting the Second Amendment does not mean abandoning common sense. The right to own guns in this country must remain, while we also must strengthen our laws to prevent mass shootings. ~ Claire McCaskill

To all the kids from the "special" reading class back in high school (the one where you tried to form words using wooden blocks)
PLEASE stop telling me that I can't blame an "inanimate object" for the off-the-hook gun violence in this country. YES! ... I CAN!!! I blame all the "inanimate objects" in Congress who refuse to pass sensible gun legislation because they're too chicken-shit to take on Wayne LaPierre and the gun lobby. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

the fact that a police officer on TV said what used to be a fist fight or road rage is now a shooting, and what used to be a domestic dispute is now a gun rampage, and what used to be a tardy or disruptive student is now a school shooter, the fact that the police aren't much better themselves, the fact that what used to be an arrest or a warning is now a split-second execution ~ Lucy Ellmann

Columbine was so frightening. And the media took off with it, like everything else, so it instilled more fear in people. You're looking around at school for kids like the ones who committed the shootings, and you feel wrong for doing that, you know? ~ John Robinson

I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. ~ Megan McArdle

The other thing to realize is that almost all these shootings, including this shooting [in San-Bernardino], happened in a government building where people are not allowed to defend themselves. While it's not the ultimate answer, the ultimate answer would be no violence, part of the answer is saying, "We need to allow people to defend themselves." ~ Rand Paul

If the GOP truly cared about saving lives, they'd stop blocking gun violence research. ~ DaShanne Stokes

My stories are of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sun, mental abuse, and constant threat of death. But they are also stories of faith, hope, triumph, and love. They are stories of perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up! ~ Livia Bitton-Jackson

Yet civil rights issues are very much on the front burner in South Carolina between the Black Lives Matter movement and police shootings. ~ Ari Shapiro

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born ... ~ Khaled Hosseini

I made 'Bowling for Columbine' in the hope the school shootings would stop and that we would address the issue of how easy it is to get a gun in the United States, and tragically, those school shootings continue. ~ Michael Moore

What I know is my music gets blamed for school shootings. ~ Marilyn Manson

An industry devoted to serving the public's right to know gives twisted and evil men the means of becoming known. This problem is not obviously amenable to a solution, and it certainly is not amenable to a legal one. A regime of media regulation that would be both effective at preventing mass shootings and consistent with the American Constitution is no easier to imagine than a regime of gun regulation that would meet the same criteria. ~ James Taranto

In a comprehensive study of all public multiple shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that the only public policy that reduced both the incidence and casualties of such shootings were concealed-carry laws. Not only are there 60 percent fewer gun massacres after states adopt concealed-carry laws, but the death and injury rate of such rampages are reduced by 80 percent. ~ Ann Coulter

When a person denies his conscience for too long, it can become seared. That person becomes susceptible to receiving and accepting all sorts of harmful and evil things. This is true for both believers and unbelievers. A seared conscience will open a person up to demonic spirits and activities. ~ Henry Hon

Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them. ~ Plato

Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process. ~ Sebastian Junger

90% of U.S. mass shootings are committed by white people aged 14-56. For some reason I've never ONCE heard a white person called a terrorist. ~ Chris Rock

Honestly this is not going to change unless the people who want to prevent these kinds of mass shootings from taking place feel at least as passionate, at least as mobilized and well-funded as the NRA and the gun manufacturers are because the politics in Congress are such where even members of Congress who know better are fearful if they vote their conscience and support common sense measures like background checks, they're worried they're going to lose. ~ Barack Obama

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith.I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism. ~ Adam Gopnik

The television screen is the lens through which most children learn about violence. Through the magnifying power of this lens, their everyday life becomes suffused by images of shootings, family violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, and everything else that contributes to violence in our society. It shapes their experiences long before they have had the opportunity to consent to such shaping or developed the ability to cope adequately with this knowledge. ~ Sissela Bok

To claim that America's "culture of violence" is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer. ~ Stephen King

In some deep, dark way we all become salacious around a disaster; our mouths water slightly when there's a real emergency. Hurricanes, typhoons, wars, shootings, epidemics; we're a little aroused because now we really have something to think about rather than our monotonous lives; something to take the focus away from our to-do list. ~ Ruby Wax

When a country with less than five percent of the world's population has nearly half of the world's privately owned guns and makes up nearly a third of the world's mass shootings, it's time to stop saying guns make us safer. ~ DaShanne Stokes

We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes ~ Charles Bukowski

Forget the National Debt Clock. We need an electronic billboard to track all the daily shootings in this country. I'm really sick of listening to all the mouth breathers who soil their camouflage pants every time someone suggests we might have a gun problem. Other countries have crazy, violent people. What they don't have is 300,000,000 WMDs and a gun show loophole that allows any psycho with a valid credit card to own 'em. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

Guns make losers feel like winners. That's why people who suck at life don't want to give up their guns. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

In America, people with pre-existing mental health issues have access to firearms but not healthcare. Thanks, Republicans! ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

The funny thing is all these school shootings that we have, always happen in very religious communities. Maybe it's because the centre of their lives is a big fat nothing and it's just a fantasy and there's nothing there. I think maybe that might have something to do with it. ~ Matthew Bright

Racist Americans stigmatize entire Black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence but don't similarly connect White neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of While males who engage in mass shootings. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work. ~ Richard Engel

It wasn't the first time Moss had heard the pop of a gunshot. Nor was it the first time he'd heard the sickening sound of air leaving someone's body. The sound meant the worst. ~ Mark Oshiro

The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous. ~ Matthew Pearl

Saying gun control hurts our freedom is a false argument amounting to propaganda. Gun laws don't curtail freedom any more than speed limits or seat belts. You still get to drive your car and have guns, we're just trying to save lives as you do. ~ DaShanne Stokes

I happened to see Larry King interview Billy Graham shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I had read an article the previous month about violent video games and their effects on the minds of children, desensitizing them to the act of killing. Larry King asked Billy Graham what was wrong with the world, and how such a thing as Columbine could happen. I knew, because Billy Graham was an educated man, he had read the same article I had read, and I began calculating his answer for him, that violence begets violence, and that we live in a culture desensitized to the beauty of human life and the sanctity of creation. But Billy Graham did not blame video games. Billy Graham looked Larry King in the eye and said, 'Thousands of years ago, a young couple lived in a garden called Eden, and God placed a tree in the Garden and told them not to eat from the tree ... '
And I knew in my soul he was right. ~ Donald Miller