After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the irony in punishing the innocent for the actions of a few.
William S. Burroughs' quote critiques the tendency to enact broad restrictions on gun ownership following violent events, suggesting that such measures unfairly target law-abiding citizens rather than addressing the root causes of violence. It reflects on the nature of accountability and the challenges of effective regulation in a society that values individual rights.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about gun control legislation.
God save the Queen and a fascist regime β¦ a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
Language is a virus from outer space.
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and donβt know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.
The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
Fate is the raw materials of experience. They come uninvited and often unanticipated. Destiny is what a man does with these raw materials.
In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.
Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.
Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.
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