Atal Bihari Vajpayee Quotes
I believe the gun is no solution to problems.
Vajpayee, Atal Bihari. "Address at Public Rally in Srinagar." 18 Apr. 2003, Srinagar. Selected Speeches of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, vol. 5, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 2004, p. 76.
This was his commentary in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre by a deranged student who bought two powerful guns and killed 32 people on campus.
This quotation was particularly shocking to many conservative Republicans for whom it was a fundamental principle that the government should do nothing about gun control and the issue of gun accessibility. Hyde, breaking what had been a conservative wall of silence, had generally been a legislator of great principle who put national and public interest above that of party when critical problems as he saw them were at stake.
Like many other ideologues, the Senator was a better politician than he was a historian. He had a tendency to not be very accurate in his facts. In this particular gaff, which was castigated by critics, he was wrong about both facts he gave. First, not only was it not the case that there were few gun crimes “back then”. See {640086} and {640085} . Second his implication that everyone carried guns, and the guns were responsible for the “low” gun crime rate, was also false. Gun crime was so prevalent that most towns and cities in the West had gun control ordinances prohibiting carrying guns in the city limits. The famous Gunfight at the OK Corral which the Senator cited was in Tombstone, AZ in 1881. At that time, it was illegal to carry a gun in Tombstone. See {640063} for the gun control ordinance. As a matter of fact, the OK Corral gunfight was fought because Sheriff Wyatt Earp was disarming some cowboys who brought their guns to town. Glen Kessler, The Washington Post fact checker gave this quotation “3 Pinocchios”.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was an Indian statesman who served three terms as the Prime Minister of India, first for a term of 13 days in 1996, then for a period of 13 months from 1998 to 1999, followed by a full term from 1999 to 2004. Vajpayee was one of the co-founders and a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation. He was the first Indian prime minister not of the Indian National Congress to serve a full term in office. He was also noted as a poet and a writer.
