“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.”
- Anton Chekov and the famous maxim “Chekov’s gun.”
“I grew up in the D.R. and the U.S., two countries that suffer no aversion to firearms. Truth is, among the many inaccuracies in my fiction are how few firearms I actually depict… That’s the sorcery of guns; they can summon all the repressed and obscure violence of their users’ pasts. It is through our weapons that our unhealed wounds speak their hideous demotics most fluently.”
- Junot Diaz in an interview for the New Yorker
“The deadly shooting this month in Maine has once again shone a spotlight on how frequent this type of violence is in the United States compared with other wealthy countries.”
- Nurith Aizenman, for NPR on 10/31/23
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