Gun nuts intimidate mothers in parking lot

[peach174]

People who live in open carry States do not have a problem with law abiding Citizens who carry their guns in public.
We who are exposed to it and see them around all the time, feel safer with them around.

 

[Vandalshandle]

Well, in looking at the picture, it looks to me like a normal day in New Orleans. I used to live in Arlington,Texas and it wasn't really a terrible place to live, but if they want to make it look and feel more like New Orleans, I guess I don't care, since I no longer live in either place.

 

[Pogo]

That is your perception. The reason for that demonstration of publicly armed citizens was to show that the mere sight of a gun, or guns, need not be menacing.

Uh--- that's everybody's perception. Without that perception, neither this thread nor the story in the OP even exists, because it means no more than another leaf falling off the oak tree.

Regardless of our foggy memories of the '50s, we don't live in them; we're in 2013. Therefore we all behave in ways that address the sensibilities of 2013. If the purpose had been so innocuous, then the women, the restaurant manager, the passersby, all would have shrugged it off and ordered their dessert. And that would have made the venture of these twenty people pointless and therefore they wouldn't have bothered.

Sorry but the fact that they showed up brandishing weapons doesn't allow this kind of wiggle room. They had an emotional purpose, and they achieved it. And they achieved the backlash that came with it. Which, again, they knew would be coming. IOW they got exactly what they came for.

"Brandishing?"

bran·dish
transitive verb \ˈbran-dish\

: to wave or swing (something, such as a weapon) in a threatening or excited manner


Again, there is a problem with your perception. None of those armed demonstrators brandished their weapons.

Uh-- we just did this ten posts ago. She left out the inconvenient second definition in the same entry:

2. To display ostentatiously.

So yes, they did. That was their whole point.

What have all these many hundreds of dumb gun laws achieved? The answer lies in your long list of screwball shootings -- which we didn't have before the laws started coming. So unless you are willing to accept a situation in which the police are able to stop your car and to knock on your door and demand entry to search for guns, please give some thought to the idea that maybe the armed citizen is the solution to a problem which the existing level of law-enforcement cannot solve.

No shit. That's what I've been saying.

The law isn't the only instrument of change. Think outside the box.

 

[MikeK]

Fatalistic. You're saying, "oh well, what can we do, let's just throw up our hands and give up".

No. What I'm saying is what we've been doing, which is passing a lot of clearly ineffective laws which attempt to attack the problem from every possible angle, isn't working. So it's obvious we need to try something else.

What do you suggest?

 

[Pogo]

People who live in open carry States do not have a problem with law abiding Citizens who carry their guns in public.
We who are exposed to it and see them around all the time, feel safer with them around.

The trouble with that is -- the observer doesn't know which is which --- between the law abider and the thug, between the stable citizen and the nut job. The only thing the observer can be certain of is "I see a gun and I know what it's capable of". You'd have to be either insane or in complete denial to not know that by now. And with an open carry law, the thug/nutjob has no incentive to hide his piece because he becomes part of the background.

That probably is more of a point on the wisdom of open carry laws though.

 

[KGB]

As long as you can point out where anyone claimed a law was broken, we'll go ahead and do that. But what you're doing here is trying to deflect from the actual point, which is, for you slow readers, i n t i m i d a t i o n.

If this is your A game, you're just not ready.

You are the one implying that a law was broken because someone felt scared of another group that assembled peacefully & exercised a right. Contrary to your belief, but people have a right to oppose a view point even if it "scares" other people. Hell, I have no problem if these mothers want to meet & talk about what they want. They are free to do so under the freedoms of this country. But to turn around & be critical of another group who disagrees with them & yell intimidation when that group is also exercising its freedom demonstrates clearly the hypocrisy of the Left.

So we're backing away from "gun grabbers" and hoping no one notices. Check.

There is no law in question here. The question was intimidation, which is an emotional dynamic. And that's what I posted on.

It's pointless to argue that the gun nuts were NOT there to intimidate, because if that's not their point, there's no point in them showing up with guns. They could have shown up with signs, but they chose a show of force. A sign says "here's my position". A gun says "I can blow your head off right now". Just a tiny shade of difference there. They also could have walked into the restaurant like normal people and invited themselves to join in the discussion. But they clearly weren't interested in dialogue; they wanted confrontation. Their point was to polarize. You could say it goes with the whole wild west mentality: don't like something, just blow it away.

As for your pretend-hypocrisy, this just in: you can intimidate people while staying within the law. ALL of those photos I posted were doing just that. Duh.

Now if you want to discuss what Texas law is, that's another thread. I don't live in Texas anyway, so you're on your own there. What I'm looking at is rhetorical/emotional dynamics. And that means how this group is making their point -- not how "legal" it is. I'm not interested in the legal process. I'm interested in the intellectual process.

Oh, so now we are required to be sensitive to other people's feelings before we can properly exercise our God-given rights. This also is a typical gun-grabber trait or at the very least, a liberal trait. Play on the emotion of fear of an inanimate object. I don't know if you are against the 2nd Amendment or for it, but nothing these law abiding citizens did was against the law. They are within their rights to display their weapons openly in the state of Texas. And that my friend is what is relative here. You can be involved in the rhetorical/emotional aspect all you want, the point is, everyone acted accordingly & were all within their rights. Any attempt to spin it differently (like the NY Times did) is shameful....

 

[KGB]

People who live in open carry States do not have a problem with law abiding Citizens who carry their guns in public.
We who are exposed to it and see them around all the time, feel safer with them around.

The trouble with that is -- the observer doesn't know which is which --- between the law abider and the thug, between the stable citizen and the nut job. The only thing the observer can be certain of is "I see a gun and I know what it's capable of". You'd have to be either insane or in complete denial to not know that by now. And with an open carry law, the thug/nutjob has no incentive to hide his piece because he becomes part of the background.

That probably is more of a point on the wisdom of open carry laws though.

and now you are finally getting it. The observer shouldn't know the difference. More to the point, neither should the criminal which is at the heart of open carry. If a thug sees someone with a weapon, they know two things:

1) This isn't a soft target to exploit.

2) This isn't worth it.

See, a crime does not happen. That's the whole point. People who take the 2nd Amendment to heart understand the world is full of evil. A gun by itself doesn't drive away that evil completely, but it levels of the playing field.

 

[MikeK]

No shit. That's what I've been saying.

The law isn't the only instrument of change. Think outside the box.

Then please enlighten us. Help me to think outside the box. What do you recommend?

 

[Vandalshandle]

I live in a open carry state (Arizona). I find it ironic that virtually every place of business in California has a "No smoking" sign out front, while virtually every place of business in AZ has a "No firearms allowed" sign out front... I'm watching macho guys everywhere taking their guns off and putting them in their glove boxes before they go into stores. It's kind of amusing watching them put them back on after they return to their car, just in case they get ambused on the way from the 7/11 store to where they pick up junior from school.

 

[Pogo]

Fatalistic. You're saying, "oh well, what can we do, let's just throw up our hands and give up".

No. What I'm saying is what we've been doing, which is passing a lot of clearly ineffective laws which attempt to attack the problem from every possible angle, isn't working. So it's obvious we need to try something else.

What do you suggest?

I agree about the laws. We should have remembered this from Prohibition.

As you noted already we have a deeply embedded gun culture; I would extend that to say a culture of violence generally. Without getting too deeply tangential, we take the attitude that the way to address any obstacle is to blow it up, shoot it, eliminate it. I call it the Lobotomy Mentality.

What we see in the endless torrent of gun violence is the fruition of that underlying drive, and the firearm is the instrument that makes it easy for Everyman to be the next Loughner, just as the automobile made it easy for Everyman to travel. But underneath is the culture of violence and the gun fetish that it centres on. Without that particular set of values, gun violence just doesn't happen.

That's what needs to change. We once had, for instance, a culture of slavery. To rationalize that we told ourselves there was a class of species not quite human. We got over ourselves on that. We had (recalling your incarnation of the 1950s) a culture of cigarettes. It was fashionable, cool, desirable. Doctors smoked. We got over our delusions on that too.

Bob Costas had it exactly right on his Monday Night Football commentary almost a year ago. I spent a day on a sports message board refuting the whizbangs who were posting all day about Costas' "gun control rant", pointing out that that wasn't his point and he never mentioned gun control or laws at all. That's a case of meme propaganda being pushed and parroted without anyone bothering to stop and see if it holds water. Anyway I had no desire to stay on a sports message board and that's when I came here, to make the same point.

We DO have a gun culture, and it's a detriment, and it's costing us just as cigarettes did. It's glorified and trivialized every hour of every day in movies, TV cop shows, video games, even child's toys. Again, that doesn't mean reacting through law-- it doesn't mean censoring movies or banning video games. That doesn't work anyway -- Japan is a noted example where violent video games are at least as popular as here, yet that country has a tiny fraction of our gun violence. Or take the case of punitive drug laws-- does it diminish the use of cannabis to call it a "narcotic" and toss users in jail? Not at all. You don't change behaviour by banning things. It's been tried, and it fails because human nature doesn't work that way.

What needs to disappear is the drive, the desire, the lust for the detrimental factor, whether it be a drug or a cigarette or a firearm mentality. It requires not a legal solution but a social/spiritual one. It requires that we stop and examine our values as they are and assess which ones are working against us. We didn't need to ban tobacco for its use to plummet; we used a social pressure. That can be far more effective for a problem than throwing laws at it. And in this case, far more effective. The problem isn't the firearm; it's the mentality. It's the value we attach to it; a value of destruction.

It won't happen overnight or this year or this decade. But the longest journey begins with a single step.

 

[Pogo]

You are the one implying that a law was broken because someone felt scared of another group that assembled peacefully & exercised a right. Contrary to your belief, but people have a right to oppose a view point even if it "scares" other people. Hell, I have no problem if these mothers want to meet & talk about what they want. They are free to do so under the freedoms of this country. But to turn around & be critical of another group who disagrees with them & yell intimidation when that group is also exercising its freedom demonstrates clearly the hypocrisy of the Left.

So we're backing away from "gun grabbers" and hoping no one notices. Check.

There is no law in question here. The question was intimidation, which is an emotional dynamic. And that's what I posted on.

It's pointless to argue that the gun nuts were NOT there to intimidate, because if that's not their point, there's no point in them showing up with guns. They could have shown up with signs, but they chose a show of force. A sign says "here's my position". A gun says "I can blow your head off right now". Just a tiny shade of difference there. They also could have walked into the restaurant like normal people and invited themselves to join in the discussion. But they clearly weren't interested in dialogue; they wanted confrontation. Their point was to polarize. You could say it goes with the whole wild west mentality: don't like something, just blow it away.

As for your pretend-hypocrisy, this just in: you can intimidate people while staying within the law. ALL of those photos I posted were doing just that. Duh.

Now if you want to discuss what Texas law is, that's another thread. I don't live in Texas anyway, so you're on your own there. What I'm looking at is rhetorical/emotional dynamics. And that means how this group is making their point -- not how "legal" it is. I'm not interested in the legal process. I'm interested in the intellectual process.

Oh, so now we are required to be sensitive to other people's feelings before we can properly exercise our God-given rights. This also is a typical gun-grabber trait or at the very least, a liberal trait. Play on the emotion of fear of an inanimate object. I don't know if you are against the 2nd Amendment or for it, but nothing these law abiding citizens did was against the law. They are within their rights to display their weapons openly in the state of Texas. And that my friend is what is relative here. You can be involved in the rhetorical/emotional aspect all you want, the point is, everyone acted accordingly & were all within their rights. Any attempt to spin it differently (like the NY Times did) is shameful....

You're back to babbling about "law" again.

Fuck the law. Still not the point here. Never was.

People who live in open carry States do not have a problem with law abiding Citizens who carry their guns in public.
We who are exposed to it and see them around all the time, feel safer with them around.

The trouble with that is -- the observer doesn't know which is which --- between the law abider and the thug, between the stable citizen and the nut job. The only thing the observer can be certain of is "I see a gun and I know what it's capable of". You'd have to be either insane or in complete denial to not know that by now. And with an open carry law, the thug/nutjob has no incentive to hide his piece because he becomes part of the background.

That probably is more of a point on the wisdom of open carry laws though.

and now you are finally getting it. The observer shouldn't know the difference. More to the point, neither should the criminal which is at the heart of open carry. If a thug sees someone with a weapon, they know two things:

1) This isn't a soft target to exploit.

2) This isn't worth it.

See, a crime does not happen. That's the whole point. People who take the 2nd Amendment to heart understand the world is full of evil. A gun by itself doesn't drive away that evil completely, but it levels of the playing field.

Riiiight. Because the answer to guns is.... MORE GUNS!

 

[MikeK]

I live in a open carry state (Arizona). I find it ironic that virtually every place of business in California has a "No smoking" sign out front, while virtually every place of business in AZ has a "No firearms allowed" sign out front... I'm watching macho guys everywhere taking their guns off and putting them in their glove boxes before they go into stores. It's kind of amusing watching them put them back on after they return to their car, just in case they get ambused on the way from the 7/11 store to where they pick up junior from school.

While I strongly support the "No Smoking" policy of the California stores, what purpose do you feel is served by the "No Firearms Allowed" policy in the Arizona stores?

Smoking is offensive. It is physically harmful and to a non-smoker it stinks! But I find nothing offensive about someone strapped with a handgun, or for that matter an M-1 Garand slung on his shoulder. I might consider it unusual, or redundant, but it would neither offend me nor frighten me. That is mainly because I know how easy it would be for a screwball with mayhem in mind to have a fifteen-shot automatic pistol concealed under his shirt or jacket. So essentially I am more concerned with what I can't see than that which is open to view.

If you don't mind the extra weight and discomfort imposed by being strapped, that's your business. The upside to it is you possibly could be my salvation if some screwball decides to start shooting up the place. Because it seems that an outstanding problem in every example of a screwball shooting is there are no armed citizens nearby to take the shooter out.

 

[Jarlaxle]

This thread is a total fail, why is it still going?

Does it not occur to you that if the first half of your post were true, the second half wouldn't be?

Guess not.

His post is, of course, entirely true. Ample evidence is provided by your own post: every thread you pollute with your presence is, by definition, a total fail.

 

[Pogo]

This thread is a total fail, why is it still going?

Does it not occur to you that if the first half of your post were true, the second half wouldn't be?

Guess not.

His post is, of course, entirely true. Ample evidence is provided by your own post: every thread you pollute with your presence is, by definition, a total fail.

... then why are you reading it, let alone posting in it?

 

[Vandalshandle]

I live in a open carry state (Arizona). I find it ironic that virtually every place of business in California has a "No smoking" sign out front, while virtually every place of business in AZ has a "No firearms allowed" sign out front... I'm watching macho guys everywhere taking their guns off and putting them in their glove boxes before they go into stores. It's kind of amusing watching them put them back on after they return to their car, just in case they get ambused on the way from the 7/11 store to where they pick up junior from school.

While I strongly support the "No Smoking" policy of the California stores, what purpose do you feel is served by the "No Firearms Allowed" policy in the Arizona stores?

Smoking is offensive. It is physically harmful and to a non-smoker it stinks! But I find nothing offensive about someone strapped with a handgun, or for that matter an M-1 Garand slung on his shoulder. I might consider it unusual, or redundant, but it would neither offend me nor frighten me. That is mainly because I know how easy it would be for a screwball with mayhem in mind to have a fifteen-shot automatic pistol concealed under his shirt or jacket. So essentially I am more concerned with what I can't see than that which is open to view.

If you don't mind the extra weight and discomfort imposed by being strapped, that's your business. The upside to it is you possibly could be my salvation if some screwball decides to start shooting up the place. Because it seems that an outstanding problem in every example of a screwball shooting is there are no armed citizens nearby to take the shooter out.

Well, since I don't own a place of business in AZ, I guess that I can't speak for those that object to people packing heat into their establisments. I will say, however, that my bank is one of those places that object to it....and the post office.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Bull. Shit. Of course it is. That was the whole point. Without that there's no reason to show up.

That is your perception. The reason for that demonstration of publicly armed citizens was to show that the mere sight of a gun, or guns, need not be menacing.

Uh--- that's everybody's perception. Without that perception, neither this thread nor the story in the OP even exists, because it means no more than another leaf falling off the oak tree.

Regardless of our foggy memories of the '50s, we don't live in them; we're in 2013. Therefore we all behave in ways that address the sensibilities of 2013. If the purpose had been so innocuous, then the women, the restaurant manager, the passersby, all would have shrugged it off and ordered their dessert. And that would have made the venture of these twenty people pointless and therefore they wouldn't have bothered.

Sorry but the fact that they showed up brandishing weapons doesn't allow this kind of wiggle room. They had an emotional purpose, and they achieved it. And they achieved the backlash that came with it. Which, again, they knew would be coming. IOW they got exactly what they came for. To suggest "there was no intimidation" is not just blatant denialism, it suggests that the group failed at their objective. I don't think they failed at all. If they did nobody would be talking about it.

The overwhelming perception of the people in this thread is that there was no intimidation on the part of the gun owners. I guess that makes you an asshole, again, and wrong.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

People who live in open carry States do not have a problem with law abiding Citizens who carry their guns in public.
We who are exposed to it and see them around all the time, feel safer with them around.

The trouble with that is -- the observer doesn't know which is which --- between the law abider and the thug, between the stable citizen and the nut job. The only thing the observer can be certain of is "I see a gun and I know what it's capable of". You'd have to be either insane or in complete denial to not know that by now. And with an open carry law, the thug/nutjob has no incentive to hide his piece because he becomes part of the background.

That probably is more of a point on the wisdom of open carry laws though.

Does that means we need to treat people like criminals and lock everybody up? That would solve the problem of no one but cops having guns, but it would totally destroy your precept that you are pro freedom.

 

[Pogo]

That is your perception. The reason for that demonstration of publicly armed citizens was to show that the mere sight of a gun, or guns, need not be menacing.

Uh--- that's everybody's perception. Without that perception, neither this thread nor the story in the OP even exists, because it means no more than another leaf falling off the oak tree.

Regardless of our foggy memories of the '50s, we don't live in them; we're in 2013. Therefore we all behave in ways that address the sensibilities of 2013. If the purpose had been so innocuous, then the women, the restaurant manager, the passersby, all would have shrugged it off and ordered their dessert. And that would have made the venture of these twenty people pointless and therefore they wouldn't have bothered.

Sorry but the fact that they showed up brandishing weapons doesn't allow this kind of wiggle room. They had an emotional purpose, and they achieved it. And they achieved the backlash that came with it. Which, again, they knew would be coming. IOW they got exactly what they came for. To suggest "there was no intimidation" is not just blatant denialism, it suggests that the group failed at their objective. I don't think they failed at all. If they did nobody would be talking about it.

The overwhelming perception of the people in this thread is that there was no intimidation on the part of the gun owners. I guess that makes you an asshole, again, and wrong.

The overwhelming perception of humans was once that the earth was flat. I guess that means we're all descended from assholes.
Where do you see this poll by the way?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

I live in a open carry state (Arizona). I find it ironic that virtually every place of business in California has a "No smoking" sign out front, while virtually every place of business in AZ has a "No firearms allowed" sign out front... I'm watching macho guys everywhere taking their guns off and putting them in their glove boxes before they go into stores. It's kind of amusing watching them put them back on after they return to their car, just in case they get ambused on the way from the 7/11 store to where they pick up junior from school.

You must live in a big city, if they tried that in the small towns they would go out of business.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Fatalistic. You're saying, "oh well, what can we do, let's just throw up our hands and give up".

No. What I'm saying is what we've been doing, which is passing a lot of clearly ineffective laws which attempt to attack the problem from every possible angle, isn't working. So it's obvious we need to try something else.

What do you suggest?

I agree about the laws. We should have remembered this from Prohibition.

As you noted already we have a deeply embedded gun culture; I would extend that to say a culture of violence generally. Without getting too deeply tangential, we take the attitude that the way to address any obstacle is to blow it up, shoot it, eliminate it. I call it the Lobotomy Mentality.

What we see in the endless torrent of gun violence is the fruition of that underlying drive, and the firearm is the instrument that makes it easy for Everyman to be the next Loughner, just as the automobile made it easy for Everyman to travel. But underneath is the culture of violence and the gun fetish that it centres on. Without that particular set of values, gun violence just doesn't happen.

That's what needs to change. We once had, for instance, a culture of slavery. To rationalize that we told ourselves there was a class of species not quite human. We got over ourselves on that. We had (recalling your incarnation of the 1950s) a culture of cigarettes. It was fashionable, cool, desirable. Doctors smoked. We got over our delusions on that too.

Bob Costas had it exactly right on his Monday Night Football commentary almost a year ago. I spent a day on a sports message board refuting the whizbangs who were posting all day about Costas' "gun control rant", pointing out that that wasn't his point and he never mentioned gun control or laws at all. That's a case of meme propaganda being pushed and parroted without anyone bothering to stop and see if it holds water. Anyway I had no desire to stay on a sports message board and that's when I came here, to make the same point.

We DO have a gun culture, and it's a detriment, and it's costing us just as cigarettes did. It's glorified and trivialized every hour of every day in movies, TV cop shows, video games, even child's toys. Again, that doesn't mean reacting through law-- it doesn't mean censoring movies or banning video games. That doesn't work anyway -- Japan is a noted example where violent video games are at least as popular as here, yet that country has a tiny fraction of our gun violence. Or take the case of punitive drug laws-- does it diminish the use of cannabis to call it a "narcotic" and toss users in jail? Not at all. You don't change behaviour by banning things. It's been tried, and it fails because human nature doesn't work that way.

What needs to disappear is the drive, the desire, the lust for the detrimental factor, whether it be a drug or a cigarette or a firearm mentality. It requires not a legal solution but a social/spiritual one. It requires that we stop and examine our values as they are and assess which ones are working against us. We didn't need to ban tobacco for its use to plummet; we used a social pressure. That can be far more effective for a problem than throwing laws at it. And in this case, far more effective. The problem isn't the firearm; it's the mentality. It's the value we attach to it; a value of destruction.

It won't happen overnight or this year or this decade. But the longest journey begins with a single step.

We do not have a culture of violence, only a drooling idiot would even attempt to argue that we do.

Your fear does not control me, so keep it to yourself.