Don B. Kates Jr.

American criminologist & gun-rights constitutional lawyer · d. 2016

Don B. Kates Jr. was an American criminologist and civil-liberties lawyer who became one of the most-cited academic advocates of the individual-right reading of the Second Amendment. In his 1990 monograph Guns, Murders, and the Constitution, he cited Freud to argue that psychoanalysis linked retarded emotional development to fear of weapons, not to owning them. Internet users later compressed and inverted his careful gloss into a snappy maxim and pinned it on Freud himself.

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“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity”

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