Bloodbath Nation Quotes

“From the earliest days of the Republic, we have been divided between those who believe that democracy is a form of government that grants individuals the freedom to do whatever they please and those who believe that we live in a society and are responsible for one another, that the freedom given to us by democracy also comes with an obligation to help those who are too weak or too sick or too poor to help themselves - a centuries-long conflict between the need to protect individual rights and freedoms and the interests of the common good.”
― Paul Auster, Bloodbath Nation

“Not every gun owner is as sane or self-possessed as the plumber from Sutherland Springs, after all, and if, as the NRA argues, law-abiding Americans should be and must be armed to protect themselves against the lawbreakers who threaten our safety, vast numbers of fearful, often irrational people will be empowered to make split-second decisions that will inevitably lead to more killings of unarmed strangers. To put a gun in everyone’s hand would turn the United States into a country of soldiers and thrust us back to the early colonial days when every citizen was a musket-bearing warrior and did lifetime service in the local militia. Is that what we want from America today—the right to live in a society of permanent armed struggle? If the problem is too many bad men with guns, would it not be wiser to take those guns away from them rather than arm the so-called good men, who in many if not most instances are considerably less than good, and thereby eliminate the problem altogether, for if the bad men had no guns, why would the good men need them?
As my mother used to say to me whenever I spun off into one of my wild, passionate speculations about how to improve the world: “Dream on, Paul.”
― Paul Auster, Bloodbath Nation

“One gapes at the wonder of those headphones. A man is about to toss two canisters of tear gas into a crowd of four hundred people and then open fire on them with a shotgun, semi-­automatic rifle, and a handgun, and yet his nerves are so delicately strung that he cannot bear to listen to the clamor and the screams those actions will inevitably provoke.”
― Paul Auster, Bloodbath Nation

“One beer too many, and a verbal dispute suddenly and unexpectedly explodes into a punching match. Such things happen every night in bars, pubs, and cafés all across the world, but the bloody noses and aching jaws that generally follow from these dustups in Canada, Norway, or France often turn out to be gunshot wounds in the United States.”
― Paul Auster, Bloodbath Nation

“When we talk about shootings in this country, we invariably fix our thoughts on the dead, but seldom do we discuss the wounded, the ones who survive the bullets and go on living, often with devastating permanent injuries: a shattered elbow that renders an arm useless, a pulverized kneecap that turns a normal stride into a painful limp, or a blown-apart face patched together with plastic surgery and a prosthetic jaw. Then there are the victims whose bodies were never touched by gunfire but who go on suffering from the inner wounds of loss—a maimed sister, a brain-injured brother, a dead father. And if your father is dead because your mother shot and killed him, and if you go on loving your mother in spite of that, it is almost certain that you will gradually succumb to living in a state of so many crossed mental wires that a part of you will begin to shut down.”
― Paul Auster, Bloodbath Nation

“The anti-gun control minority is correct when they say that gun violence is caused by the irresponsible or unhinged people who use guns, but to say that guns do not cause gun violence is no less ludicrous than saying that cars do not cause car crashes or that cigarettes do not cause lung cancer. Not every person who drives a car will be in a crash, not every cigarette smoker will die of lung cancer, and not every gun owner will use his gun to maim or kill himself or someone else. But people shoot other people with guns because they have guns, and people commit suicide with guns because they have guns, and the more guns there are to be bought and the more people there are to buy them, the more people will kill themselves and others with guns.
This is not a moral or political statement—it is a question of pure mathematics”
― Paul Auster, Bloodbath Nation

“Sjsnsn”
― Paolo Auster, Bloodbath Nation