But his constitutional right
Maaaaybe we can begin to see the problem now?
No, of course not, that’s just silly.
Guy walks into a Walmart carrying an assault rifle and wearing body armor. April Fool! In August! 6 days after another guy murdered 20 people in a Walmart with an assault rifle while in body armor. It was a test. That’s all, just a test. What’s everybody so riled up about? He was testing Walmart’s loyalty to the sacred right to carry assault rifles everywhere.
“I wanted to know if that Walmart honoured the second amendment,” the 20-year-old told police after his arrest.
Prosecutors have charged him with making a terrorist threat.
If found guilty, the charge could result in a four-year prison sentence and a fine of $10,000 (£8,300), Greene County prosecutor Dan Patterson said in a statement.
I bet he scared the bejeezus out of everybody in that store.
Prosecutor Dan Patterson said that while residents of Springfield, Missouri, were allowed to carry weapons, “that right does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens.”
Oh really. How, exactly, does that work? If they’re allowed to carry weapons, how are they supposed to know they can’t carry them into Walmart? If they are allowed to carry them into Walmart, how can all the people there avoid terror and panic and shock? What does it mean to be allowed to carry weapons but not allowed to carry weapons? What were you assholes expecting to happen?
One of these days some asshat like this is going to exercising his (always) 2nd Amendment rights and some other guy’s going to shoot him because he’s perceived as a threat.
Re #1, two incidents come to mind.
One, a couple of “good guys with guns” open-carried into a store to “protect” people. One belligerently challenged the other. No shots were fired, THIS time.
Two, a friend who is a gun owner and a gun control advocate told some gun nuts that he would presume anyone open-carrying into a coffee shop meant harm and he would shoot them. This did not go over well.
Re #1&2, I remember reports of an incident a couple of years ago in which a man was in a shopping mall, legally carrying a gun in a shoulder holster inside his jacket. He didn’t draw any attention to himself but an observant security guard noticed the gun when his jacket flapped open. The guard took it upon himself to effect an arrest and the gun owner was almost killed as several more people dived on him, put him in a chokehold, and restrained him until the police arrived.
Obviously, in that state (I forget which) in which concealed carry is perfectly legal the fact that the gun owner was black played no part in the guard’s vigilance or in the public-spirited assistance the guard received from the bystanders. No siree Bob.
Americans like to pretend that other countries, without this ordinary ‘freedom’, are fascist hellholes in the making where the government is a whim away from locking its unarmed population away in camps just like the Nazis did.
I have spent my childhood around those kinds of people, and I went on to spend my adulthood in Canada, and now Germany. I know which of those three is closer to fascism, and which two gave the freedom from the paranoia and anxiety that armed arseholes intentionally evoke.
I do have to wonder about the ‘mental health’ question here. When do arrogance, stupidity, and crackpot politics become full-tilt pathologies?
Seth, I had a friend in college who visited Israel, and was enthusing about the fact that there were armed soldiers who would jump out and threaten you with a gun if you so much as stopped to talk to a child on the street. He wanted more of that here in the US…felt his child would be safer.
And he was a liberal in almost every way.
Most, no, all gun owners I personally know would agree with that presumption. Whether they would shoot preemptively is up for grabs, though.
Honestly if he really cared he would have just worn a T-Shirt that said he liked the 2nd Amendment. Instead he went out there looking like an idiot and scaring innocents. Conveniently, there is actually a place you can get free shirts so you don’t do what he did. LOL http://bit.ly/iPacShirts