War & Peace Quote by Michael Steele

Steele is doing a familiar bit of American political jujitsu: conceding the premise of gun regulation while quietly draining it of force. By opening with "you can have all the gun control laws", he signals reasonableness, even fatigue with ideological trench warfare. The pivot is "but if you don't enforce them" - a move that relocates the problem from policy design to execution, from legislating to policing. It flatters audiences who want to sound pragmatic while keeping the argument safely away from hard questions about what effective enforcement would actually require (resources, surveillance, penalties, political appetite).

"People are going to find a way to protect themselves" is the emotional payload. It frames gun ownership less as a preference than as an adaptive necessity in a world where the state can't be trusted to keep you safe. Self-defense becomes the default moral posture; regulation becomes an abstract constraint on a concrete fear.

The "bad people" line is the neatest piece of subtext: it narrows culpability to a villain class, distancing the broader gun ecosystem - lawful owners, hobbyists, collectors - from the outcomes society is trying to prevent. That distinction is rhetorically useful because it turns mass harm into a problem of individual depravity rather than availability, access, or lethality. "Hobby" is doing more work than it should: it normalizes firearms as leisure equipment, nudging the listener toward a cultural identity (responsible, ordinary) rather than a risk calculus.

Contextually, this is a politician trying to hold together a coalition: pro-regulation voters who want action, gun-rights voters who fear punishment by association, and a public that mostly wants the violence to stop without changing too much. The language offers sympathy, not solutions - and that is often the point.