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talkpolitics2010-04-20 12:32 pm
3fgburner.livejournal.com) wrote in talkpolitics2010-04-20 12:32 pm
Second Amendment March
Greetings, all -- I was at the March, yesterday. That is, I was at the real one on the Mall, not the spinoff across the river. A week or two ago, in a discussion of Tea Partiers, I had a brief dialogue with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
squidb0i about the 2A March. He said that in the absence of credible threats to gun rights, the 2A March was simply a front for "teabaggers".
With that in mind, I kept a conscious eye out for TEA Party type signs, pamphlets, handouts, etc. Attendance was in the high hundreds, maybe over a thousand. I wandered around and saw most of the crowd at one time or another. There were 2-3, maybe 4 signs that could be interpreted as TEA Party related. There was one sign for the John Birch Society, back in the back. There was one religious nutjob, and a couple of Third Way whackos. That's it, out of a LOT of people. Everybody else there was attending to promote gun rights.
There was a certain amount of mockery directed at outfits like the SPLC, mostly by people like Nicky Stallard of the Pink Pistols, and Kenn Blanchard aka Black Man With A Gun(tm). The SPLC had apparently labeled a number of the organizations there as "hate groups", including Oathkeepers. Nicky pointed out that it was pretty stupid to call 2A advocates racists or homophobes, considering that she and Kenn were speaking. All in all, a good time was had by those attending, and I got to see and meet some of the icons of the gun rights movement. I even got to give Dick Heller one of my empty-holster flags: an L-shaped piece of red posterboard, with a sticker showing the DC flag and "Disarmament Without Protection". He was amused.
squidb0i about the 2A March. He said that in the absence of credible threats to gun rights, the 2A March was simply a front for "teabaggers". With that in mind, I kept a conscious eye out for TEA Party type signs, pamphlets, handouts, etc. Attendance was in the high hundreds, maybe over a thousand. I wandered around and saw most of the crowd at one time or another. There were 2-3, maybe 4 signs that could be interpreted as TEA Party related. There was one sign for the John Birch Society, back in the back. There was one religious nutjob, and a couple of Third Way whackos. That's it, out of a LOT of people. Everybody else there was attending to promote gun rights.
There was a certain amount of mockery directed at outfits like the SPLC, mostly by people like Nicky Stallard of the Pink Pistols, and Kenn Blanchard aka Black Man With A Gun(tm). The SPLC had apparently labeled a number of the organizations there as "hate groups", including Oathkeepers. Nicky pointed out that it was pretty stupid to call 2A advocates racists or homophobes, considering that she and Kenn were speaking. All in all, a good time was had by those attending, and I got to see and meet some of the icons of the gun rights movement. I even got to give Dick Heller one of my empty-holster flags: an L-shaped piece of red posterboard, with a sticker showing the DC flag and "Disarmament Without Protection". He was amused.
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