A piece by Dioni Wise in today's News & Record reveals plans by a gun-rights group to hold a Restore the Constitution Rally at Guilford Courthouse Park on Aug. 14.
The thing that makes it different from other rallies is that pretty much everybody will be wearing loaded sidearms.
Oh, I get it: People love their guns, and there's no way they'll give them up. But really, is this a good idea? Check out Jerry Wolford's photo of the kid eating at Stamey's with his piece riding on his waist. Anybody else just a little uncomfortable with that?
7 comments:
"People love their guns, and there's no way they'll give them up."
Does it then follow that anti-gun folks hate the US Constitution?
doesn't bother me at all , would feel comfortable sitting right next to him
Michelle: Maybe they feel that more guns on the street increases their likelihood of getting shot.
Keith: The sidearm thing doesn't actually bother me so much, particularly since I know so many people who need to wear them as a matter of course for their jobs. And most people who carry know what they're doing. But that's not something you can assume, I don't think.
Either way, the prospect of a rally comprised of people carrying loaded guns makes me nervous. Which I guess it's supposed to.
"Maybe they feel that more guns on the street increases their likelihood of getting shot."
Yet another reason to prefer thinking over feeling.
And I disagree that the rally is supposed to make people nervous. That's funny/sad/semi-offensive. There are so many misconceptions about people who exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.
I don't know, Michelle, seems like straight-up math to me. A person is more likely to get shot in a place where there are lots of guns — say, a gun rally — than at a place where there are fewer or no guns, like a church picnic.
I believe in gun rights, and I understand why it is so high up on our Bill of Rights. But I also believe that some people take it too far.
Also, maybe I missed something, but I don't believe there is any pending legislation that will affect gun owners in the works, just a Supreme Court decision that ruled in gun owners' favor. As a special-interest group, they are pretty well represented and not, it seems to me, in any jeopardy of losing this right.
Meanwhile, equal protection under the law, illegal search and seizure, and freedom of speech are the wallflowers at the big dance.
I wonder how these same people feel about the Black Panther Party.
That's an interesting wrinkle, Eric. It brings to mind Robert Williams, the NAACP leader in Monroe, NC in the late 1950s who chose to use the Second Amendment as a tool to advance black liberation, causing friction with the national organization, which was relying on a legal strategy of litigating to uphold the equal protection provision of the Constitution. Williams and his fellow activists insisted on their right to use publicly funded swimming pools funded with taxpayer money and came armed in self defense. What could be more American?
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