If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos, you know what monkeys — these particular monkeys — are like: They jerk … - Kevin D. Williamson

America is not an idea or a collection of documents, but neither is it a closed ethnolinguistic set. It is a nation in which relations among the people and between the individual and the state are defined by the terms of citizenship.

When things go sideways in this unhappy world, nobody cries out in the dead of night: “For the love of God, somebody call the Dutch!”

Nobody but nobody is quite so dumb as to believe that all, most, or even very many uses of firearms to prevent acts of criminal violence result in justifiable homicides. Most of them do not result in anybody’s being shot, much less shot dead, because most of them do not involve discharging a firearm. As it turns out, pointing a gun at a would-be assailant is in many cases a very persuasive gesture.