A small meeting for a gun control group in Texas was disrupted on Saturday by dozens of armed, pro-gun advocates, some of whom were photographed kneeling in a parking lot and brandishing their weapons.(Bolds mine. AP photo of the gun-totin' Texans available at TPM. - SB)
According to a statement from the gun control group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, four of its members were meeting inside the Blue Mesa Grill in Dallas when the confrontation took place.
The group said the confrontation was carried out by members of an organization called Open Carry Texas. The statement said that nearly 40 armed men and women, including some with semi-automatic rifles, arrived in the parking lot outside the restaurant after learning of the small gathering on Facebook.
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"A well regulated militia..." begins the Second Amendment to our Constitution. That's almost a description of this open-carry group: I don't know that they're particularly "well regulated," but it's plain to see they are "malicious."
Their Twitter and Facebook groups have not be taken down. In 2013, I fear, that actually counts as 'well-regulated'.
ReplyDeleteConstance, this incident is an example of an increasingly common kind of illogic, in which a group (Concealed Carry Texas) has reduced the entire Bill of Rights to one and only one amendment, the Second Amendment, to the exclusion of all others, the exclusion in this case of the First Amendment right of other Americans to disagree with them.
DeleteOne should be able to propose, e.g., a different interpretation of the Second Amendment, without being threatened by forty people toting and brandishing guns... the First Amendment means, at least, the right to discuss firearms without conforming to any gun enthusiast's limitation of the range of the discussion. But to these jerk-offs, there is the Second Amendment and only the Second Amendment. Sorry, no... what they did is at least unacceptable and probably illegal. If it is not, then the First Amendment is dead.
My country-boy granddad hunted as part of his family's livelihood. Even today, in retrospect, I understand he had a right to do that. But even if he were still alive, I can't imagine he would point one of his shotguns at me for being a vegetarian and advocating vegetarianism to other people. He has a right; I have a different right. Both rights can be accommodated, unless massive groups of 40 people start carrying their weapons with the explicit intent of intimidating people they disapprove of... the Second Amendment does not protect them in threats of violence, and neither does the First. To parody a common truism, like spending, shooting is not speech.