A few days ago, the NRA issued a statement scolding the ammosexual groups in Texas that created a backlash by parading around Chipotle with assault rifles, scaring the shit out of the restaurant’s customers:
Recently, demonstrators have been showing up in various public places, including coffee shops and fast food restaurants, openly toting a variety of tactical long guns. Unlicensed open carry of handguns is legal in about half the U.S. states, and it is relatively common and uncontroversial in some places.
Yet while unlicensed open carry of long guns is also typically legal in most places, it is a rare sight to see someone sidle up next to you in line for lunch with a 7.62 rifle slung across his chest, much less a whole gaggle of folks descending on the same public venue with similar arms.
Let’s not mince words, not only is it rare, it’s downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about your business while being prepared to defend yourself. To those who are not acquainted with the dubious practice of using public displays of firearms as a means to draw attention to oneself or one’s cause, it can be downright scary. It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates.
The NRA issued its scolding a week after the allied gun nut groups whose antics caused the Chipotle backlash had asked members not to parade around with assault rifles in businesses anymore. Here’s the response from Open Carry Texas and affiliated muzzle-strokers to the NRA’s broadside:
The more the NRA continues to divide its members by attacking some aspects of gun rights instead of supporting all gun rights, the more support it will lose. Already, OCT members are posting pictures of themselves cutting up their life membership cards. If they do not retract their disgusting and disrespectful comments, OCT will have no choice but to withdraw its full support of the NRA and establish relationships with other gun rights organizations that fight for ALL gun rights, instead of just paying them lip service the way the NRA appears to be doing. The NRA should have instead released a statement to the effect that it applauds our groups for coming together and finding new methods to promote safe and responsible open carry.”
Open Carry Texas, et al, is as naïve as Kay Corleone telling her mob boss boyfriend that sterling characters like senators and presidents don’t send men to their deaths like a common button man. Here’s the skinny, Open Carry Texas & Co.: The NRA is a gun manufacturers’ lobbying group. They don’t give a flying fuck about your right to enjoy a burrito in public while dreamily stroking your long, hard muzzle.
By acting like sinister gun-humpers in public, y’all are becoming a threat to the NRA paymasters’ bottom-line profits because you’re making people associate gun ownership with kooks like yourselves. That’s why the NRA called you weird and impractical and scary.
Clearly the only proper response to this outrageous insult is to create life-size Wayne LaPierre images on cardboard and film yourselves using them for target practice. This will make you look totally sane and rational.
Wag
This. A thousand times, this.
Hunter Gathers
I’d hate to break this to the swine that run the NRA, but I’m afraid that this Open Carry thing is one chicken that can’t be un-fucked.
OzarkHillbilly
Not possible.
bemused
Ha, wingnutty gun group chastises ever more insane wingnutty gun groups and the latter turn nasty. Gee, NRA, who could have predicted?
S. cerevisiae
Why do these bozos always assume the general public will consider them “good guys” instead of criminals there to rob the place or make a hit? Do they wear white hats?
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Again, I will never understand the pants-wetting, all-consuming fear and paranoia that would provoke someone to consider themselves never safe unless they had a gun or 5 on their person at all times, if it didn’t involve their job. Cops, security guards, soldiers, I expect them to be armed, because that’s they’re job. Joe Schmoe going to the 7-Eleven and balking if they’re told they can’t bring their gun in, because of the fear of a random stick-up while they’re out buying a Mike’s Hard?
Christ all, people, how do you live your life that afraid of every shit? This is coming from a guy who feels the need to open up shower curtains if they’re closed because horror movies affected me as a kid to think closed curtains could mean a killer or a dead body (and even then I know it’s an irrational fear). How do you live like that, afraid that a bogeyman is around every damn corner to where you need your side arm ready at a half-second’s notice?
Belafon
@S. cerevisiae: It’s the ultimate winger fantasy world: They are heroes because they of course they are. It’s the world that’s fucked up if it can’t accept it.
NonyNony
Well, yeah. But on top of that the NRA is terrified that the following sequence will occur:
1) Open Carry Gun Nut takes guns into a restaurant populated by upper-middle class Texan families.
2) Open Carry Gun Nut get angered by someone at the restaurant
3) Open Carry Gun Nut blasts the guy in the face because he’s pissed off
or, alternatively:
2) Open Carry Gun Nut messes around with a loaded gun and accidentally kills two or three people when it goes off in his hands
Either one is terrible because if that happened in Texas a few people might just remember their goddamn history and remember what Western towns gun control laws were really like in the Old West and that it wasn’t like the cowboy movies made it seem.
Botsplainer
@S. cerevisiae:
White people, duh. By default, they’re good guys and responsible gun owners until they aren’t. Since Jesus and his dad will make everything better for victims and their bereaved in the afterlife (and will surely forgive any perpetrator or criminally reckless gun activist, so long as Jesus Chraaahst is accepted as their personal Lord and Savior), any mistakes are going to be made up for.
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
I posted this on an earlier thread, but it seems to belong here as well:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/02/mn-man-pulls-shotgun-on-neighbor-teaching-daughter-ride-bike-i-should-have-shot-him/
You think it’s bad now, wait until mass-dementia really hits the ageing, fantasy-prone, white male NRA.
Punchy
You’d end open carry in Texas the day 8 legally-armed black 25 year olds calmly stroll into a Lubbock Cracker Barrell sporting saggy pants and sweatshirts with AKs on their shoulders. Of course, you’d likely need a dozen ambulances on the ready (8 for the obvious, plus the 4 wrinklies whose tickers kick it at the sight of such wanton negressive behavior).
scav
Oooooh, shades of Fantasia and the NRApprentices, enchanting all the RoomBrooms to carry water for them . . . .
Botsplainer
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Some of them blow the shit out of household budgets by placing several in every room in the house, “just in case”. Their wives, children and lifestyles suffer for it, and because the country is so awash in guns, they have no decent resale value unless they’re genuine collector pieces.
My main line is this – “if you need that many guns to fight off the hordes of zombies/negroes/Latinos, you won’t survive the encounter, and shouldn’t really want to”.
My other line is this – “in the comparative analysis of value to the community as a whole and society at large, your average criminal thug who is in a bad spot in his life and resorting to crime probably has more social utility than your average trembling 60+ white conservative ammosexual. The thug is probably loved by more people, gets along better with peers who are willing to take risks for him, spends more in the economy and is far more capable of redemption, selfless charity and productivity”.
Shakezula
Root. For. Injuries.
[Makes popcorn]
Amir Khalid
I would add: Film your next visit to Chipotle, Denny’s, Chik-Fil-A etc. too. Make sure to show how parents react when they see strangers with guns around their kids. Put the videos on YouTube, make sure they go viral. That will win so many people over to your cause.
Roger Moore
@S. cerevisiae:
White skin.
The Dangerman
I’d fully support the Open Carriers if they provided clear and foolproof instructions on how to tell a “good guy with a gun” from a “bad guy with a gun”.
ranchandsyrup
we hold this truth to be self-evident, that gun manufacturers’ profits are sacrosanct and codified in the 2nd amendment.
Southern Beale
150 of these loons showed up at Texas Home Depots this weekend. Like a fucking army. Would like to see them try this nonsense at a bank, or perhaps a federal prison. See how far they get.
Assholes.
peach flavored shampoo
Film your next visit to
Chipotle, Denny’s, Chik-Fil-A etcChuck E. Cheese and Showbiz. too. Make sure to show how parents react when they see strangers with guns around their kidsFixed. Or take them into Six Flags or Schlitterbahn. Come on Big Shooter, show your big, fat, throbbing weapon to a room full MILF and 800 hysterically freaked out kids.
Bubblegum Tate
1) This purity purge is going to be AWESOME! OCT has already said that the NRA is “siding with Moms Demand Action.” It’s only going to get crazier.
2) Legal question: Given Texas is a Stand Your Ground state, wouldn’t an agitated weirdo with a fucking AR-15 approaching you be grounds enough to shoot him in self-defense? Is that what these nuts are hoping to have happen?
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
It’s very simple. If the guy with the gun is deliberately shooting people or threatening to shoot people, he’s a bad guy with a gun. Otherwise he’s a good guy with a gun.
Face
@peach flavored shampoo: Can you take your weapon down a waterslide with you? Can you ride a roller coaster with a Remington? Can you play their shoot-at-target carnival games with real ammo?
Haydnseek
Chick-fil-a killer still at large! Gun freaks mow each other down in fit of mindless rage. Appalling scene of blood-soaked carnage! Dozens dead, hundreds maimed! MSM media questions Obama’s slow response. When Obama responds, MSM viciously attacks him for criticizing responsible, chicken-consuming christian gun owners. When called out on their hypocrisy, MSM brays, “But what about gun rights? What about the second amendment? When questioned about the entire second amendment, the response was ” Well regulated militia? Don’t change the subject, that’s just those guys in the woods up in Michigan running around in their new cammo! Oh, and before I forget, BENGHAZI!”
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Face: Thirty years ago, I played one of those games with a real .22 rifle. In Paris.
peej
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: I used to work with a guy who decided he needed a concealed carry permit so he could defend himself (and everyone else, I presume, but maybe not) from the al Queda attacks he dreamed were going to happen at the mall. Of course, it’s more likely that the mall would be attacked by some crazed young white man.
El Caganer
We have indeed arrived at a strange place, where the number of firearms owned keeps increasing while the number of owners is decreasing. These people are completely bugfuck insane, and this is going to be one very long and very hot summer. It would not surprise me at all if we started having several mass shoot-outs every week; what would surprise me would be if there were any political response other than some feeble rhetoric.
Trollhattan
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers):
Jesus. I think I’d list my house, pronto. Do love that wifey bodily dragged his ass into the house.
Lee
They had another open carry event over the weekend.
They truly are their own worst enemy.
OzarkHillbilly
@NonyNony: Sandy Hook didn’t bother them. Aurora didn’t bother them. Trayvon Martin didn’t bother them. UCSB didn’t bother them. They don’t care how many die or who is responsible.
Glocksman
I’m pro-gun and I have a carry permit.
That said, open carry for civilians is obnoxious, stupid, and tactically moronic.
If I were a bad guy looking to steal something that’s easily resellable and has a high value, that $1500 AR on your back makes you a nice target.
Head: meet pipe.
Besides, my first thought upon seeing someone walk into Chipotle’s with an AR on their back is ‘whackjob shooting up the place’, not ‘good guy with a gun’.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Who could have imagined that whipping your lunatic fringe into a froth then keeping them in a constant state of rage, fear and resentment might backfire? Why, that’s never happened before in America. Ever. Not even once.
El Caganer
@Face: Would you shoot them from your car? Would you shoot them in a bar?
Forked Tongue
I said this elsewhere, but when are these guys gonna just cut to the chase and start advocating for Open Masturbation laws?
gnomedad
@Face:
Attention, Onion (while you still have the lead on reality, anyway).
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
If only Aaron Burr had cited his Second Amendment rights and Stood His Ground after shooting that whiny liberal Alexander Hamilton!
Lee
@Bubblegum Tate:
I live in Texas and I think our SYG is not exactly like Florida’s. I think our’s is more of a ‘no duty to retreat’ law.
I think they tried to pass FL style SYG law 2 years ago and it failed.
Glocksman
@peej:
The only time I ever carried regularly was when I worked part time at a convenience store on 3rd shift.
If all they wanted was the money, no one would ever have known I was packing, as it’s not worth it mentally or legally to shoot someone over the store’s insured cash.
If I was ordered into the back room or to lay down on the floor on the other hand…
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Forked Tongue:
Do you know why assault rifle have a big fixed front sight?
It’s so the ammosexuals’ hands don’t fly off the end of the muzzle while they’re “appreciating” it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Glocksman: Nothing like advertising.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers): You have to remember that Burr was a horrid liberal as well. One with rather better views than most of his contemporaries on slavery and women’s rights.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@peej:
Folks like that always seem like they believe they’re in Red Dawn when they’re more likely to end up in Falling Down.
gnomedad
@El Caganer:
Yes, I want them in a car!
Yes, I want them in a bar!
Yes, I want them here and there!
I want my weapons everywhere!
Amir Khalid
@El Caganer:
Incidentally, does the budding ammosexual in America need a separate licence/carry permit for each of his lethal darlings, or just the one for them all?
NonyNony
@OzarkHillbilly:
Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, California.
None of those places are Texas.
(To be honest, I personally think you’re right and doubt it would matter. But I can see the NRA freaking the hell out at the idea that a critical mass of Texas could decide that one stupid accident – or worse, one rage induced shooting – by a bunch of gun nuts at a Chili’s in a nice suburban strip-mall area was enough to start pushing back and forcing some sanity on the gun laws. If Texas starts pushing back the NRA is in trouble, so they want to keep that bud nipped.)
Hungry Joe
One thing no one seems to be taking into account is how much flat-out FUN it is to carry around a nasty-looking weapon in plain sight. Seriously. It’s not (necessarily) about fear. Carrying a weapon, you feel strong. You feel important. You feel like a hero-in-the-making. It’s intoxicating, and I should know because I used to do it, and do it a lot. But once I turned nine or ten it sort of made me feel stupid, so I stopped.
ericblair
I think the big worry for the NRA is the mass of middle class Republicans who are just fine with the abstract idea of open carry everywhere, more or less as a tribal marker and a thumb in the eye to that Kenyan Usurper. However, that open carry and freedoming and stuff is supposed to be out in the sticks and on TV, not in their local McDonald’s and especially not with a bunch of twitchy, angry, and pretty downmarket-looking individuals in a publicity stunt.
Glocksman
@Amir Khalid:
Depends upon the state.
Some require a separate purchase license for each gun while most do not.
My permit is good for any handgun I lawfully possess.
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):
Oh do shut up and decease in the immediate vicinity of an igneous phenomenon, you historically correct scumbag! There I was being all rhetorical and ironic and you spoiled it! I hate you! Next you’ll be telling me that the Founding Fathers didn’t even have Stand Your Ground laws!
Shakezula
@Glocksman: My first thought on seeing a picture of a guy with a rifle in a WalMart was it would be so easy to take it from him. I mean, they sell baseball bats in Walmart.
I wonder if they’ve realized they can’t legally carry and defend their rifles, hence these group outings.
As for the idea anyone should wait to see what you’re up to when you saunter into a restaurant with a rifle on your back. Yeah. Ha ha ha, no I don’t think so.
In the meantime they’re providing great cover for the next psycho.
Arclite
Stop it. You’re arousing me.
You do realize that civilians carrying military-style weapons to restaurants is what the founders had in mind when they wrote the second amendment, don’t you?
Bubblegum Tate
@Lee:
Ahhhh, good to know. Thanks.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers):
Now that you mention it….
Lee
How long before someone takes a couple really loud firecrackers to one of these events and sets them off hoping for a chain reaction?
ericblair
@Hungry Joe:
Yes, it’s intimidating, which is a lot of the appeal. Trouble is, yer average schlub just trying to get a couple of Happy Meals and a Big Mac combo doesn’t like to be intimidated.
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):
I refudiate you, Sirrah!
Now if that isn’t a crushing blow, I might have to melee with the evil beast….
Glocksman
@ericblair:
Indeed.
When I’m out in the sticks and some guy in hunting gear walks into the store that doubles as a game check station, I don’t think twice about it.
If I were back home in downtown Evansville and some guy walks into the Subway with an AR, you’d better bet I’m wondering what’s going on.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Glocksman: It’s almost like you are suggesting that there appropriate and inappropriate places to have a firearm.
Soonergrunt
@NonyNony:
Texas.
These kinds of things are fodder for the morons because they believe they’d actually BE the “good guy with a gun” that would save the day.
More likely, they’d only add to the casualty count.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Lee: Photo 8 of 10 at the Dallas Morning News link is among the more disturbing: a pre-toddler touching the stock of the weapon slung across the woman holding the kid. I do not need a DSM to suggest these people are not mentally healthy.
RaflW
@NonyNony:
Yeah, this.
We pretty much just think “Darwin awards” when an idjit at a gun show shoots himself in the nads.
But a random customer being shot dead by an idjit discharge of a long gun at Chipotle would create a strong public reaction much less favorable to gun profiteers.
bemused
@Hungry Joe:
Too funny. Little boys playing gunslinger.
Shakezula
@Glocksman: Are you in Hoosierstan?
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@RaflW:
Dollars to the donuts the gun-fappers would be screaming “False flag operation” to each other before 5 minutes had passed.
NonyNony
@NonyNony:
Let me also add to this, because I realized I missed something else:
“Lone nut with a gun”, “Lone nut with a gun”, “Victim was a black kid who was probably a thug who deserved it”, “Lone nut with a gun”.
A weapon accidentally firing in a Chipotle killing/injuring a middle class suburbanite family is going to have a different reaction than someone going out and intentionally killing someone would. In the latter case gun nuts can plausible say “that guy was insane”. While they might also throw the Open Carry Texas guys under the bus if an accident happens, they can’t plausibly do that and maintain that carrying around guns near kids is a completely safe idea and nobody should be trying to restrict them. Because if they say “well, those Open Carry guys were irresponsible” it opens the door up to questions like “would it ever be responsible to carry a loaded firearm into a restaurant full of children” and “if it’s irresponsible to openly carry a long gun into a restaurant, why isn’t it also irresponsible to concealed carry a pistol into the same restaurant?”
They may have answers to those questions, but the NRA doesn’t want to parse fine details. They know how emotional humans get about this stuff because they’ve been exploiting that emotional reaction for years to further their own agenda. If it starts to blow back onto them it’s going to blow back hard.
boatboy_srq
@NonyNony: If it could be guaranteed that a roomful of ammosexuals would only shoot each other, I’d be all for letting them have at it.
@Hungry Joe:
You’re assuming the average ammosexual has an emotional maturity level above nine-or-ten.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I have some free advice for Open Carry Texas.
The best way to tell if the gun is loaded is to put the muzzle in your mouth and pull the trigger. Give it a “shot”, it’s always accurate!
Long Tooth
There’s a strange correlation between Open Carry types and the NRA, and T-Baggers in relation to the rest of the republican party.
kindness
Oh damn….you should be writing for a gun-humping blog. You know lines like ‘stroking their long….hard…..muzzle’ is one way to get ’em to wipe the Cheetoz stains off their fingers.
‘Ma!!! Throw another box of Kleenex down to me in the basement, would you?’
Trakker
When you use fear, paranoia, and outright lies to achieve your goals, don’t be surprised to find that the angry rabble actually believe the sh-t you feed them and are now spiraling out of control, threatening to take you with them.
I’ve always felt that gun owners themselves are their own worse enemy because they just can’t bring themselves to rein in the looniest among them. I’m actually hearing reasonable people discuss repealing the Second Amendment since Sandy Hook and the many shootings since then. I never expected to hear that discussed in my lifetime (though I’d support it).
Long Tooth
@Long Tooth: My edit didn’t take (operator error, I assume).
I added: may they all go the way of the republican party of California– into electoral oblivion. Frankly, and undoubtedly because I’m a Northern Californian who witnessed that implosion, I think that same scenario is in the process of playing itself out nationally.
Hungry Joe
@Glocksman: No kidding, Evansville? I was born there, lived there till I was 10 and we moved to SoCal. We had season tickets to the Aces games at Roberts Stadium. (This was a LONG time ago.)
Tokyokie
I saw these yahoos congregated on a street corner a couple of weeks ago (I guess they’d just visited the nearby Home Depot), and they looked exactly like the kind of losers you’d expect. You know, the last people you’d want carrying loaded firearms. I rolled down my window to say to the one who had wandered onto the median on my side of the street, “You’re perverts, not patriots,” but he rejoined his buddies, and I didn’t consider them worth my time to cross the street to confront.
Long Tooth
@Tokyokie: Boy, you would sure have looked silly if he had ended that conversation forever by saying, “You’re dead”.
I mean, WTF? Rolling down a window to engage in a belligerent conversation with a heavily armed lunatic? What on earth were you thinking?
RSA
I wonder how open carry would work at a Fourth of July celebration, with drunken people throwing firecrackers around? Sounds like a recipe for potential disaster.
SpotWeld
Here’s the thing that occurs to me. NRA’s goal is to sell more guns. They want to motivate people to buy guns and minize any laws that would minmize sales.
The Open Carry folks, they’re going to buy guns. It’s what they’re all about. The NRA doesn’t really need them. Even if Open Carry is “anti-NRA” they’ll still lap up “gun grabber” news bites from the NRA sources.
So, what does the NRA lose by a little air gap between them and the nut-baggers? Not much as far as I can tell. What do they gain? The appearance of a “reasonable moderate position’ (as seen from the view-from-nowhere).
Talentless Hack
@Punchy: Or even better, looking like Samuel L. Jackson, wearing berets, BDU pants, and combat boots.
Shakezula
@Trakker:
When you talk about gun owners reining in the loonies among them, I wonder how you think this would this be done? There are some huge and often intentional divides between people who happen to own guns and the ammosexuals, because the ammosexuals are fuck ups and freaks who also happen to own guns. In other words, people anyone in their right mind would avoid.
It’s kind of like saying dog owners should do something about people who run dog fighting rings.
Tokyokie
@Long Tooth: There was only one on my side of the street, and the yahoos were all smiles because they believed they’d made their idiotic point. I think they were also handing out pocket-sized Constitutions, so he had his hands full. I’d have driven off before he could have gotten the gun off his back. But somebody needs to stand up to them.
Botsplainer
@NonyNony:
“A tragic accident. The guy whose gun it was is a greater victim than the person shot, because he’s going to carry that memory for the rest of his life, but the Good News is that Jesus and His Dad will fix it all in the afterlife. They’ll fix it for the victim to, so long as he/she/the child had accepted Jeeeeeesus Chraaaaaast as their personal Lord and Savior.”
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@Shakezula:
They do, by making laws via the legislative process and enforcing them via the police.
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@Tokyokie:
You know, if you’d floored the accelerator and swerved at just the right time, you could have had 5 points right there.
Botsplainer
@Hungry Joe:
Roberts got torn down a few years ago. We did drop by Evansville last week on our way to visit a child over in Southern Illinois – wife hadn’t been there since her parents moved away in 2002. We saw her old house and her high school (Harrison).
nancy darling
A
My dictionary defines hijinx (sic) as merrymaking, boisterous celebration, unrestrained fun.
They got the unrestrained part right. This choice of words tells me the NRA doesn’t think strutting around with long guns in public is really all that wrong or harmful. It just LOOKS bad.
Berial
Don’t believe that ‘accidental’ gunfire will have too much effect on the general public. Guy has his concealed gun accidentally discharge in church. I don’t remember ever hearing about any charges.
Long Tooth
@Tokyokie: “I’d have driven off before he could have gotten the gun off his back”.
You’re faster than a speeding bullet, eh?
Remember that scene in The Fugitive when Harrison Ford got the drop on Tommy Lee Jones in the dam? If so, you must remember that the second after Ford split, Jones un-velcro’d the concealed handgun he was carrying (not to mention the rifle long shot exhibition at the beginning of the movie Quincy Down Under).
Car engines, too, have been known to quit unexpectedly quit on occasion.
There was only one successful resolution to the corner you painted yourself into, which you successfully implemented when you skedaddled. But any number of other bad scenarios could just as easily have played out. Right?
You’ll prove wise if you never doing anything like that again for the rest of your life (and may it be a long, happy one).
chopper
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers):
this comment in the story is solid gold snark:
aimai
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers): This is a point I made a year or so ago on this blog and got slammed by someone who was on the pro gun side. I can’t remember the poster but he became hysterical over it. But its logically inevitable. The number of individual gun owners is declining but the number of guns they have is increasing. Fewer and fewer (men, for the most part) are owning and hoarding more and more guns. Unless owning a gun is some kind of ticket to permanent youth as this cohort ages they are going to start suffering from dementia long before they give up owning and loading those guns. In fact the “problem” of grandpa refusing to child proof his house by putting away his guns is already a topic of conversation on the kinds of mommy boards where families tend to own guns.
burnspbesq
I especially liked the photo of the guy with what looked like an AR-15 slung across his back while standing in line at a fast food joint.
Dude, you’re a joke. If I’m even minimally competent, and I decide I want you dead, you’ll be dead long before you can be anywhere near ready to fire that weapon.
Bozos, the lot of them.
aimai
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers): How do you know how big his rack was? /deer hunting joke/
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@aimai:
Oh well played, Ma’am!
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@burnspbesq:
I had no idea that our quiet, pedantic Burnsie was a fast food killing machine. The things you learn online!
TR
Someone needs to remind the open carry nuts that there’s an organization tha doesn’t allow open carry at its national meetings — the NRA.
Woodrowfan
ironically, the open carry nuts tend to say those of us who don;t carry a gun around are “afraid.”
burnspbesq
@Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers):
Purely a hypothetical. For now.
Morzer (0th of His PseudoName and Founder of the Walter Sobchak Peacekeepers)
@burnspbesq:
So long as it doesn’t McArdle into a statistic, we good, bro.
KS in MA
@TR: Now, THAT fact gave me a much-needed laugh!
another Holocene human
@Botsplainer: Your account of their religion describes precisely the mindset that made the Crusades so bloody.
Matt McIrvin
@NonyNony: The original famous mass shooting was in Texas! UT clock tower, 1966.
Paul in KY
@Shakezula: Those people are truly stupid
DavidTC
You’d end open carry in Texas the day 8 legally-armed black 25 year olds calmly stroll into a Lubbock Cracker Barrell sporting saggy pants and sweatshirts with AKs on their shoulders. Of course, you’d likely need a dozen ambulances on the ready (8 for the obvious, plus the 4 wrinklies whose tickers kick it at the sight of such wanton negressive behavior).
I keep wondering why someone hasn’t done this.