A Quote by Richard B. Mellon

You can't mine coal without machine guns. — © Richard B. Mellon
You can't mine coal without machine guns.
Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.
We're not saying that you don't need coal, but when you do mine the coal there are responsibilities to it. It may cost a little more, but it is the right thing to do.
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.
I'm not advocating for no guns. I like mine and am not about to give them up. But in this country, my uterus is more regulated than my guns. Birth control and reproductive health services are harder to get than bullets. What is that about? Guns don't kill people - vaginas do?
Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine.
I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V. , yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.
Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.
They need to enforce how and who to give guns to. But there are Americans like me who are responsible, and they shouldn't take that away. If they outlaw guns, they won't take mine.
Do we really need to arm our citizens with machine guns or semiautomatic weapons? And don't we need to make sure that people who do own guns are qualified to own them?
Capricornia there is a particular regional particularity and that is the Adani mine. We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine... And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine.
Coal used to be a very dirty fuel but coal has become cleaner and cleaner over the decades. Clean coal now is quite clean. Clean coal now has the same emissions profile as natural gas. Clean coal can become cleaner still. We can take even more of the pollutants out of coal and I believe we should. Clean coal, I think, is the immediate answer to Canada's energy needs and the world's energy needs. There are hundreds of years available of coal supplies. We shouldn't be squandering that resource. We should be using it prudently.
I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now. You've probably never woken up early on a winter morning to the acid stink of coal smoke in the air, which was everywhere when I was a little kid. My grade school was heated with coal. Not only was coal used to generate electricity, it was without any scrubbers in the stacks.
If you write any kind of fiction about America, you immediately have to start doing some research about guns, so in some ways, 'Gun Machine' is just the culmination of 20 years of reading about guns.
Some of the worst abuses of government force in recent years were precipitated by technical and victimless gun-law violations. For example, the BATF claimed that the Branch Davidians possessed machine guns without paying the required federal tax and filling in the proper registration forms. So a tax case worth less than $10,000 led to a 76-man helicopter, machine gun, and grenade assault on a home in which 2/3 of the occupants were women and children.
Guns are our friends because in a country without guns, I'm what's known as "prey." All females are.
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