Presidential town hall and gun show

[prog]

Boy do I have a bad feeling about this.

This is probably the first time I really have to ask what usually strikes me as a lame question: can you imagine what would have happened if anyone pulled this shit around our previous president?

Comments

[hrafn]

*nod* And anyone the least bit not in agreement with the Pres. who showed up armed nearby would have been beaten and tasered and locked up for a long long time. And the press would be all "NOOOO You can't disagree with teh President! We're at WAAAAARRRRRR!!! Plus he was totally resisting arrest and therefore deserved the beating and tasering."

[pseudomanitou]

I'm going to point out one thing... the concept of 'Free Speech Zones' was actually something the Bill Clinton's administration invented, not Bush.

It's just that Bush took it too far: putting those 'zones' many miles away from his speech locations, using them at almost every chance, for nearly everything imaginable.

Odds are, those armed protesters were in a location mandated by Arizona state law -- which was probably no-where near Obama.

Even still -- you have to wonder about the frame of mind that believes you need an AR-15 assault rifle to disagree with Obama. They were happy when Bush stepped on the little people, now that Obama is in charge -- they must be assuming he'll use all the same tactics as the Bush administration. How very telling of the last eight years.

[cnoocy]

Interestingly, this post appears directly below http://maradydd.livejournal.com/472224.html (progressive arguing that armed progressives need to start showing up to town halls) on my friends page.

[treacle_well]

Fascinating.

But it's this ambiguously worded sentence that distracted me:

At Obama's town hall there, one man was arrested for having a gun hidden in his car after the Secret Service found him at Portsmouth High School hours before Obama arrived carrying a pocketknife.

Based on context I assume the it was the man who had a gun hidden in his car, not Obama, who was carrying the pocketknife. But that's not what it says, so it gave me a "sheesh, *giggle*" moment.

[radtea]

I had exactly the same response! "Why are they mentioning that the President was carrying a pocket knife?"

Pardon me...

[taskboy3000]

...but your modifier is dangling.

[xach]

That reminds me of my favorite tortured passage from the AP:

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday he expected the league’s
competition committee would review the rule that possession could not
change because the whistle blew during the offseason, as it has in the
past.

Guns don't vote

[taskboy3000]

This is amazing. Yet another bunch of yahoos who think that there guns give them liberty. They probably don't even vote. Completely stupid.

I have to say that it is because Obama draws fire from the extreme Left and Right that I like him.

[radtea]

The comments are an interesting read, particularly the discussion of whether or not this is consistent with Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals

[pseudomanitou]

Interesting.

But what I wonder is -- if someone had reacted to the right-wing protesters violently, what would have been the result?

And if the armed protesters had opened fire, for any reason, what would be the public outcome?

[radtea]

Despite the unity at the top of the Party, the Proles are divided into two tribes, so if by the "public outcome" you mean the Prole outcome, you have to consider the independent reactions of the two tribes separately.

The Right Tribe would have claimed that the Left were hypocrites and that it proved the need to keep and bear arms.

The Left Tribe would try to blame the gun-carriers for their own victimization.

The Party would use the violence as an excuse to further crack down on domestic freedoms in Amerika.

[Note: I believe all this "for analytical purposes only". I go through my days trying to make sense of the incoherent mess that is the modern United States, the rich, heavily armed psychopath of the international community, and trying to make sense of it in purely Orwellian terms is a kind of literary exercise, although also depressingly plausible.]