“Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So an arch-duke, two presidents and a member of the Beatles walk into a bar…”
“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…
My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…
Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!”
“That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit. That reminds of a joke: Lincoln was shot by a two-bit actor exercising his right to bear arms.”
“Some families, especially in politics, are soaked in blood. Two brothers, both ambitious and populist, both murdered by radicalised mutants – one a Soviet defector, the other an Arab extremist. Same as it ever was.”
“People always ask if I’ve ever seen any of my victims. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity at all if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It’s the only way to save money nowadays.”
“Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was? None of you knows? Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a twenty-eight-storey observation tower at the University of Texas, from distances up to four hundred yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? Ah, I see some of you know who he was. And do you know how far away he was? Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an Italian Carcano bolt action rifle in only six seconds, and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where these individuals learned how to shoot? The United States Marine Corps. These individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do!”
In a note he left behind after he was shot dead, Charles Whitman asked for an autopsy to be performed on him to determine if there was a physiological influence on his behaviour. They found a tumour the size of a pecan in his brain. Opinions still vary as to whether or not it was directly responsible for his mental health issues.
“Ask not what you can do for your country… ask what your country is doing to you.”
“I heard a new CIA joke recently: how can you be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassinations?”
“I don’t know – how can we be sure?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
The archduke is a tricky one. He was killed by a 19 year old student radical who was armed by a secret society made up of Serbian military. He was tried in a kangaroo court, left to rot in prison and eventually he was re-buried as a hero for aiding the Slavs to throw off the shackles of Habsburg empire. Even assassins can be venerated as martyrs and saints. Even arms dealers have a patron saint in Catholicism.”
“Nobody really thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the meat-puppets. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans, and so have I. But I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils. What do you believe in?”
“Oh, don’t be so gloomy. After all, it’s not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Hassan I-Sabbah said that. Who says video games never taught anybody anything useful? The Romans knew it too, when they butchered Caesar, and the CIA and KGB, and Gavrilo Princip, and Whitman and Oswald and Booth and Sirhan Sirhan and yes, even that fat sonofabitch Chapman with his copy of Catcher in the Rye in one hand and a 38 special in the other. So did Valerie Sonaris and Sara Jane Moore and Lynette Fromme and John Hinkley – even those who try and fail understand that once you shoot burning hot metal into the present, the future splinters into fragments.”