Second Amendment March

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

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 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.

Comments

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

More like, if the government starts rounding people up for camps; or they try to pull a Katrina and start going door-to-door confiscating people's guns for no reason; or a president loses an election, declares martial law, and refuses to step down. That kind of thing.

[paft.livejournal.com]

How about a candidate loses an election, stops a vote count, and gets appointed by the Supreme Court? Don't remember you guys making a point of carrying guns to public events back then, or while Bush was legalizing torture and eliminating habeas corpus and attorney-client privilege.

Do you think that suddenly concentration camps, gun confiscation, or a repeat of 2000 is imminent? Why?

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

I don't think that concentration camps, etcetera, are imminent. The actual probability of such things is pretty remote, and I hope it stays that way. I'd really rather just vote assholes out of office, and fix the problem that way.

Re: 2000, several organizations went back and recounted the Florida votes after the dust settled down. Bush won the recounts. Re: the Patriot Act, etcetera, I don't hold any brief for Bush & Co either - I'm not a right-winger.

At the state level, I DO carry guns to public events on a regular basis, and have done so for many years. Every January, MLK Day is Lobby Day in Virginia. I and several hundred others go down to talk to our legislators in Richmond.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Re: 2000, several organizations went back and recounted the Florida votes after the dust settled down. Bush won the recounts.

No he didn't. Using most legal criteria, Bush lost in the count of all the legal votes in the Florida. The only one he won was a count confined to the recount that Gore had requested. Bush lost the popular vote, and should have lost the electoral vote.

I DO carry guns to public events on a regular basis, and have done so for many years.

Why?

[fleaplus.livejournal.com]

> Aaaaaand there you just went into teabagger/conspiracy theory territory.

Were you responding to 3fgburner or paft?

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

Probably responding to me. See my answer to Exiled on this. I used those as examples of how bad things would have to be, to justify armed rebellion. I do NOT think that any of those things are likely. Ergo, I don't think that armed rebellion is likely.

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it was likely. For that matter, I don't think Obama is stupid enough to try that shit. I said that was how bad things would have to get, to trigger armed rebellion.

Since I've been carrying a CPR card, I've replaced 2 or 3 CPR masks that reached expiration dates. The odds are thousands-to-one, perhaps millions-to-one, that I'll be in the right place and right time to save someone. I still carry one, and don't plan to stop carrying one.

Likewise, the things I do to remain eligible for a gun permit, drastically reduce the odds that I'll need to use it. I don't drink, I don't use drugs, I don't do illegal stuff (beyond a bit of behind-the-wheel mischief, and I pays my tickets when i gets 'em). This means that I don't generally have to go to places where people get shot a lot, and don't hang out with the types of folk involved in shootings. Barring a random mugging, I'll probably never have to use a gun in self-defense. Doesn't mean I'm going to stop carrying.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

...if the government starts rounding people up for camps...

Where were you guys for Gitmo?

...or they try to pull a Katrina and start going door-to-door confiscating people's guns for no reason...

Where were you guys when that Katrina door-to-door thing was happening?

...or a president loses an election, declares martial law, and refuses to step down.

Good luck going against a military force who is now used to fighting a guerrilla army. You don't even have decades worth of Russian explosive stockpiles to work with.

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

Gitmo: Given that the people who went there were, in the main, violators of the Laws of War, they could've been taken out and shot instead of sent to Gitmo. I'm talking about things like the Japanese-American internment camps in WW II.

Katrina: I belong to two of the organizations that sued New Orleans to get people's guns back. Which, by the way, NO is still in contempt of. I also belong to the group lobbying for the law, passed in Virginia, that outlaws gun grabs by municipalities now.

Military vs Guerillas: http://www.oathkeepers.org.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Given that the people who went there were, in the main, violators of the Laws of War...

No, they were predominantly American citizens who happened to be brown, and unlucky foreign bastards whose neighbors turned them in for easy bounty money because the previous administration was eager for shlubs to pin something on. If they were so guilty as you claim, they would have been tried and convicted years ago.


Which, by the way, NO is still in contempt of.

So since they're still doing, when does step four of your ROE (http://community.livejournal.com/talk_politics/501019.html?thread=35855387#t35855387) kick in? Do you wait five years after every threat to liberty to actually do something?


Oathkeepers? That's who, not how. As in, how are they going to fight tanks and helicopters? And the whole point of this entire thread is people reacting to things that are factually not there. I don't trust the Oathkeepers to reliably interpret reality when it comes to what the government is doing.