Dominic Erdozain > Quotes

“Screen for troublemakers, and all will be well! Not only is the theory flawed on the practical level, but this doctrine of innocence is one of the engines of violence in America: an inducement to kill based on an illusion of purity. The good guy, it seems, is not the solution: he’s the problem. The first truth of the gun culture is a raging myth.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy

“Gun rights are claimed as an American birthright and clothed in the dignity of the Constitution, but this is a false and fabricated history. To believe in the gun, you have to subscribe to a series of fantasies about the American past. You have to believe Theodore Roosevelt when he says that guns civilized the West and that the men who died “generally” deserved their fate. You have to believe Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas when he writes that firearms brought “possibilities of salvation” to African Americans after the Civil War. You would have to believe that, for two hundred years, every court in the land got the Second Amendment wrong, until Antonin Scalia rode in with his dictionaries in 2008.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy

“state of nature, everyone is lord and nobody is free. Men act on their own authority, and the earth is drenched in blood. Civilization arises when individuals agree to surrender some of their natural liberty to the sober judgment of the community.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy

“No sooner had political theory rejected the divine right of kings than it ran into a more profound and subtle conundrum: the yearning of all men to be kings.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy