Hugh Howey Quotes
He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.
Howey, Hugh. Wool. Broad Reach Publishing, 2012.
This quotation is a classic case of conflation. The politician who is asked about the dangers of assault weapons and who is opposed to gun control, observes that a pencil could kill someone and that a terrorist MIGHT attack with a pencil. Therefore she conflates the semiautomatic rifles like AK47s with pencils. No one would think of legislation making it difficult to obtain pencils; therefore she makes the gun control efforts appear trivial and silly. The problem is that many Americans are killed every year by weapons designed for assaulting in battle and killing an enemy. No one can find the a case where anyone ever assaulted and killed another person by stabbing him in the heart with a pencil.
Even allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, it is clear that there were many Americans who were personally armed in this period.
Hugh C. Howey (born 1975) is an American writer, known best for the science fiction series Silo, part of which he published independently through Amazon.com's Kindle Direct Publishing system. Howey was raised in Monroe, North Carolina and before publishing his books, he worked as a book store clerk, yacht captain, roofer, and audio technician.
