After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

The remark frames gun-control debates as a recurring, reactive pattern: after spectacular violence, restrictions are proposed that primarily burden law-abiding citizens rather than perpetrators. Burroughs’s second sentence makes the deeper political claim—an armed monopoly held by the state (police and military) is, to him, a hallmark of coercive power and a step toward authoritarian social control. The quote thus treats private gun ownership less as a matter of sport or personal taste than as a structural check on government force. It also reflects a distrust of institutional authority typical of Burroughs’s broader anti-control themes, even when expressed in blunt, polemical language.