The Other Side of the Constitution

"What Crime Have I Committed, Officer?"

I recently posted an article in support of teenagers who were marching for Gun Control.
My thesis was, this is their Constitutional Right, and although I do not agree with all of their arguments, I admire them for standing up in public for their free exercise of the First Amendment.

Nobody interfered with their peaceful protest.

Now we have a clear issue of whether the Second Amendment should be equally as supported and BOY HOWDY! was I surprised that it didn't receive the same public support!

Olmos Park PD Terrorize Lawful Texans - YouTube:

Equivalent Constitutional Rights of PEACEFUL PROTESTS (First and Second amendments) are being exercised in both instances, but when the SECOND AMENDMENT is the subject, the police are all over the protesters

The protestors were openly carrying firearms (which is legal under Texas law).
Police arrested 2nd Amendment protesters, because ....

"How can I tell if you're the bad guy?

(Maybe, if they're not shooting anybody, they haven't broken a law?)

I can't find the law, I'm just telling you to obey me 

James Freeman
Olmos Park PD Terrorize Lawful Texans

"You're the only one threatening people, Officer"

Carry a gun? You're a Paranoid!

Quote of the day—Vivek Murthy | The View From North Central Idaho:

I got into some trouble for saying gun violence is a public health issue. A little bit of trouble. But you know, I was stating what I think is the obvious, and I think most people in the country understand, which is that far too many people die from gun violence. And in my book, every single death from gun violence is a tragedy because it was preventable. It’s unacceptable.

-- "Surgeon General", via Joe at joehuffman

well, yeah.

You must understand, there are various gradations of "Public Health", mostly determined by the actions of the the victim!

Minor example: if you don't brush your teeth for years, you're a skuzz and you get a lot of dental issues.

If you don't go for an annual check-up from your doctor, minor infections can become major illness.

And if you don't prepare to defend yourself against violent criminals, you are a a possible victim of homicide.

Oh, Wow!   That's a HUGE step beyond Halitosis and Skin disease!

Strangely, many of us are more concerned with relatively 'minor' infections, and completely oblivious to violent attacks.   You got to ask yourself ... if the risks of all three threats are roughly similar possibilities, why don't more of us go for semi-annual checkups, brush daily, and carry daily?

The answer is that brushing your teeth is easy to do and socially acceptable; annual medical check-ups are just "a reasonable thing to do: because we're all subject to communicable diseases;

But being attacked by a violent predator?

Gee ... you must be PARANOID!

• Here are some highlights from Crime in the United States, 2014:
• There were an estimated 1,165,383 violent crimes (murder and non-negligent homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults) reported by law enforcement.
• Aggravated assaults accounted for 63.6 percent of the violent crimes reported, while robberies accounted for 28.0 percent, rape 7.2 percent, and murders 1.2 percent.

I'm kind of hoping that someone will compare the rate of Gingivitis annually, vs violent assault.


Considering the consequences of each, I'm still willing to bet Big Money that more Americans brush daily, compared to those who regularly carry means of physical defense against assault.

So, what's it going to be?

Brush every day?

Carry every day?

Why can't you do both?

They were asking for it!

UPDATE: Open carry activists who walked into police dept.with AR-15 due in court - WXYZ.com: DEARBORN, Mich. (WXYZ) - 

Two open carry activists who walked into the Dearborn Police Department armed with guns, body armor and video cameras last month were due in court Friday morning for a probable cause hearing.
 Surveillance video captured the men walking into the building last month, while police are seen and heard telling them to put down their weapons. "Dude, put that on the ground. Put it on the ground... Or you are dead," an officer, with guns drawn is heard screaming.

Dude, they were lucky!

 I would have shot them on sight.
They apparently showed up "ready for action".

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should!"

(The Dearborn Police deserve two thumbs down a medal  for their willingness to allow these IDIOTS to pollute the Gene Pool.)

click the link to see the video

Federal Judge Opines ... open & concealed carry not justifiable

GUN WATCH: Judge Claims to Support Second Amendment, Just not the "Bear" part: open and concealed carry laws were a danger to any community.

"I think open carry (and concealed-carry) laws, with all due deference to the Second Amendment, which I support...are dangerous to any community because of the epidemic of mental health issues throughout this country," he said. "Putting guns in the hands of mentally incompetent people is a recipe for disaster."

Well ... yes.   The insanity clause seems reasonable.  But who decides who is insane?
What criteria is codified to determine insanity?

To most Liberals, anyone who thinks he/she needs a gun is ipso facto insane,

That's Crazy Talk!

How Police Can Get Around "Open Carry" laws to harass you

Connecticut Carry - Press Releases:

On February 5th, Senior Assistant State's Attorney Timothy Sugrue published a memorandum to the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office detailing first what everyone in Connecticut should already know: The unconcealed carry of a firearm with a valid Permit to Carry Pistols or Revolvers is 100% lawful, and that police cannot stop a person carrying a firearm unconcealed (Open Carry) to demand their permit absent Reasonable Articulable Suspicion of a crime.

Here's the link to that "memorandum".

Response to comment on "Open Carry": The Noisy Cricket is the right gun for me!

When I wrote my November 07, 2015 article about "Open Carry", I expected to get some outraged feedback from Open Carry Advocates.

Disappointing that I only received one response.  But at least the author had a valid question:

Anonymous said...

Cannot a citizen who is open carrying a more effective pistol or maybe rifle take out a mass murderer? Generally the pistols/revolvers that can be carried concealed are not really suitable for shooting further than across the room and may be a marginal caliber. In parts of the country with warm weather year round it is have to carry a standard service sized sidearm concealed under a t-shirt and Bermuda shorts.
Just call me Anon. Try shooting one of the lightweight compact or sub compact sidearms both rapidly and accurately when using full power 40 S&W or 45acp.
November 08, 2015 12:47 PM

I'm pretty sure that "Call Me Anons" rides a white horse.

Yes, I think it would be a wonderful thing if a Citizen could save a lot of lives by virtue of carrying a Major Weapon AND making sure that it can take out a terrorist  from the other side of the Food Court.  (It might be tempting to take out the "restaurant manager" at the same time, but that would be A Bad Thing.  Tempting .. but still Bad.  There might be innocent people present, too.)

Being at the right place at the right time, and doing the right thing, is laudable.

If the police (who will eventually show up) can tell the difference between the mass murderer and the guy with a smoking AR15 and a red do-rag around his head and a Sylvester Stallone Sweaty body and a smug smirk on his face ... Call Me Anonymous might even survive the experience.

(No, I don't really believe that, but he seems like a genuinely nice guy and I wouldn't want to feel as if I hadn't made at least some effort to validate his life.  As long as he had it, anyway.)

But I don't really want to rescue the entire K-Mart or Wall-Mart or Wally-World shopping contingent on any given Black Friday.   I don't prance through the Mall with an AR15 slung across my brawny shoulders and a couple of Banana-Clips poking out of my hip pockets in the hope that I'll stop America's Most Popular Mall-Shooter Of The Week.  That's just so ... not me!

I'm sorry if I don't sound like the super-hero type of Blogger (is there one?) and I don't want to disappoint my readership.  So I'll tell this story just once, and then I'll STFU, okay?

I've been shot at before.  There is nothing (I know some famous writer that I can't remember said this before me, but ...) .. there is nothing so rewarding as being shot at and missed.  However, my PERSONAL version goes something like:

There is nothing so rewarding as not being shot at all day, and I intend to pursue that personal gratification every day for the rest of my life, thank you very much.  

Those of you whose personal mission in life is to save the world from tyranny and/or Shopping Mall Massacres, have at it.  I'll gladly step aside and allow you all the glory.

Remember that scene in the movie "Men In Black" (#1) where Wil Smith is issued his ordnance?  He gets the "Noisy Cricket"  and he's disappointed,

"KAY ..... Give The Kid A Weapon!"





That's what **I'm** Talking about!

No, it's not. That is SO not "what I'm talking about!

For myself, I'll take a Belly Gun every day. 

No, it's not a large caliber.  No, it won't take out a terrorist mission across the width of a shopping mall or even the width of the "Ye Olde Antique Mall Shopping Mart Boutique", but if some ass ......   jerk puts his pot-belly within reach I can put my sneaky/femininistic/no-testical-man little P3AT in his belly-button and extend THAT the the opposite side of the shopping mall.

No, Brother, I don't want to save the world.  Been there, done that, got the olive-drab t-shirt.

I just want to save my own precious lilly-white ass, thank you very much.   Yes,even the parts with pimples on it ... when I really think it through, that part is precious to me, as well.   No, don't ask.

I've said it before, I'll say it again:  If the threat is so far away that I can't hit him with my .380, he probably can't hit me with his lever-action shotgun which he stole from the Terminator.    So I'll just turn my back and run away!

And I won't even feel guilty about that, because I know there's some Terminator-Wanna-Be with a black rifle and a couple of 30-round Banana Clips * who is just chomping at the bit for the opportunity to Take Down A Terrorist from across the street,  and Save Western Civilization and The World AS We Know It!

( * No, I do NOT feel guilty about calling them "banana clips"; this is my blog, I can murder words before I murder people.)

So you all can do what you want to do, just give me a couple of seconds notice before you start blasting away across the shopping mall.  I don't move as fast as I use to, so I would appreciate the advance warning.  Otherwise, I'll just have to "Duck and Cover" like they use to teach us in school to do, in case the Ruskies drop "The Bomb" on us. 

Which ... may not be all that far-fetched.

And that's all I have to say about it.

It was just a matter of time until "open carry" demonstrators became indistinguishable from mass murderers

Colorado Springs mayor has no 'appetite for' changing city's open-carry law:
November 06, 2015

Officers didn't respond until after the first shots rang out at 8:55 a.m.

At 8:55 a.m., Harpham gunned down a passing bicyclist, Andrew Alan Myers, 35. Officers were then told to stop what they were doing and respond.
Armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a .357 revolver and a 9mm pistol, Harpham continued the rampage. He killed Jennifer Vasquez, 42 and Christy Galella, 35, before dying in a shootout with Colorado Springs police.

How does a LEO know when an "open carry" fanatic is discovered to be a potential "mass murder"?
Answer, He doesn't.

"You legalize it to be OK to carry a gun - and the hard part of that is it only takes moments to level the barrel of a gun and shoot someone," Jackson said. "So these weapons are there legally. Many people can legally carry them. And sometimes really bad things happen."

Exactly.

This is just one of the reasons why I don't appreciate people abusing the "open carry" law, which they seem to do for the sole purpose of performing "in your face" demonstrations.

Or, in other words:  "I do this, because I can, and you can't stop me."

It's impossible for a LEO to know the difference between a protester, and a murderer, until the blood runs in the gutters.

That's not acceptable.

Guys, I understand that the new laws make it permissible to "open carry" but you have a responsibility to your community.  "Making a legal point" is no excuse for creating a disturbance.

 Legitimate  "Open Carry" was not evolved so you could prance around with a rifle on your shoulder; it was created so that you could just do normal "stuff".  Deliberately flaunting firearms is not the way to convince "other people" that you are a responsible gun-owner

And so, when a certifiable maniac shows up looking exactly like a "right to carry protester", there is no way for police to tell the difference between a capering protester (like you) and a legitimate threat to public safety.

"Right To Carry" demonstrators are no longer just making the rest of the law-abiding firearms owners look bad.

They (YOU!) have muddied the waters so thoroughly that innocents are being killed without the police protection they deserve, because YOU  (Yes, YOU!) have generated an environment where a murderer looks just like you.

So, I'm asking you to down-grade your rhetoric; because you're not making things better, you're making things worse.

If you were the kind of people that I enjoy sharing range-time with, I would not have to spell it out to you like this.

But you're not.  You don't even realize how your political activities make it easier for a mass murderer to hid himself among the smoke-screen you create, so he can do the things which you would never do; which is to say, he can murder people because folks think he's just another over-toe-top protester:

"You legalize it to be OK to carry a gun - and the hard part of that is it only takes moments to level the barrel of a gun and shoot someone," Jackson said. "So these weapons are there legally. Many people can legally carry them. And sometimes really bad things happen."

You're a bunch of idiots with guns, and even *_I_* don't want to be associated with you!