Second Amendment Solutions: Welcome to Tumbleweed

As we know, only alarmists, political hacks, cowards and blood libellists can be against the right to carry lethal weapons in public, including public meetings and (as legal in one state and proposed in others) on college campuses. I guess high school is the logical next choice. But maybe not: two students were wounded, one seriously and one critically, when an assault weapon brought to Gardenia High School by a student went off accidentally.

And as we also know, any implicaton that the Rabid Right's rhetoric indicates or inspires violent intentions is blood libel and a pogrom and...whatever. Except maybe in Spokane, where a bomb was planted along the route of a Martin Luther King Day parade, intended as a weapon of mass destruction. But probably it was actually a left wing socialist plot, cynically aimed at martyrizing other socialists in order to pin it on good Christians, like....

The new governor of Alabama, who spoke at MLK's old church to make the point that Christians are his brothers and sisters, and non-Christians are not.

I don't usually highlight these sorts of stories here, and I really don't like the progressive news blogs that make stars out of these people, but sometimes it's useful to take note of the ongoing hypocrisy parade. Especially when it is leading more and more to dangerous and lethal consequences.

But for all the protestations of progressive sites, they seem to be becoming their enemies in some respects. It suddenly struck me that the tenor, the cynicism, the violence and even the vocabulary at Daily Kos in 2011 to me resembles that of Rabid Right blogs of five years ago, more than the Daily Kos of five years ago...Or maybe I'm just smarting from my latest foray over there.

I knew that Democrats had backed off on new gun control legislation, and that Congress had let the assault weapon ban lapse, but I must admit I wasn't aware of how far things had gone in the direction of insanity on the subject. But re-posting the Guns in Town piece from here to Daily Kos certainly educated me. There was almost no agreement in the comments and a lot of hostility. I was even accused of not being progressive because I was supporting the principle that guns in public are a public danger, and in public meetings are an anti-democratic threat to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble. By suggesting that only the police should be armed in public places, I was in favor of a police state.

It did give me an opportunity to expand my argument in the comments:

If anyone can carry a concealed weapon into a public meeting, then the danger can come from anyone, and therefore there is a threat. The test on free speech and freedom of assembly grounds would seem to be: would a reasonable person be constrained from speaking or asking a question that might offend or anger anyone in the crowd who could respond with lethal gunfire?

More to the point, is an expression in favor of, say gun control, going to be constrained by the fact that others in the crowd may have lethal weapons, concealed or unconcealed?

Moreover, the threat is even greater when this practice is legal, because the presence of guns is more likely. The danger is also increased, simply by the likely presence of more guns. This is as well a prior restraint on the right to assemble and on free speech. Especially having seen the effects of gun violence in a public meeting, and the reasonable assumption that guns are more likely to be present when they are legal, and given the contentiousness at public meetings and especially the anger that is so openly expressed there these days, people who don't want to risk getting in the line of fire or get involved in anybody's gun fight, are less likely to attend such meetings."

However, this cut no ice with most of the other commenters, some of whom used the opportunity to discuss the relative merits of their guns. And this is on the premiere left/liberal blog site. But at least Steve Lopez at the Los Angeles Times also thinks this is all pretty insane:

"The California Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, meanwhile, has launched a statewide project to demand "gun-free dining," urging restaurants to prohibit firearms on their private property. I told Brady coordinator Karen Arntzen that if we need a conversation about whether it's OK for someone to show up at the local diner with a six-shooter, we've lost our marbles.

Is it 1823? Do we live in Tumbleweed?"

The absurdity and insanity aside, and the now daily harms way we apparently are all subject to every time we leave the house, an America bristling with guns is so much more likely to self-destruct in any nerve-wracking crisis. Those who make lots of money from guns may be as usual the motive force behind all this now, but it's the social fabric--as well as individual innocents--who will pay.