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Old August 28, 2012, 02:57 PM   #46
Jim March
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Join Date: February 14, 1999
Location: Pittsburg, CA, USA
Posts: 7,417
Quote:
So why do OC gun advocates show up at political rallies and events organized by media demagogues with the spoken intention of intimidating politicians with the so-called 2nd amendment solution? Don't tell me it didn't happen. It was on national tv. Oh that's right, it's just one of the uncontrollable splinter groups, led by some clown kicked off the clown show for not being funny anymore.
Ah. I suspect you're referring to events in the 2008 presidential race.

As ugly as you think that was, it was a very successful effort.

Here's what happened:

One guy in a NorthEastern state, I *think* New Hampster, OCed while somewhere in the general vicinity of one of the campaigns. He wasn't being very overt or confrontational. The national news picked it up - including the part about how the guy wasn't breaking any laws, wasn't arrested and didn't appear violent.

This was one of the few times the national news even mentioned the fact that gun carry was generally legal. To people inside the worst of the "occupied zones" (New York, Illinois, etc.) just learning that legal open carry was a "thing" elsewhere was news - regardless of whether some bigwig running for office was nearby.

Other OC activists realized this was a chance to show people in enemy territory that legal gun carry existed - part of the "mindshare wars" we ALL should be concerned about.

By the time one of the campaigns hit Phoenix AZ we had a very well-dressed black dude with an AR15 across his back, several blocks from an Obama event (with no plans to get closer, and Phoenix PD fully briefed ahead of time). Again, this made the national news and this time it was a double win because not only did news that THAT was legal get out, at least one of the mainstream news outlets was caught red-handed cropping to photo to block the fact that the gent in question was of the melanin-enhanced variety as the news tried to paint this as "redneck white supremacists strike again".

The overall message that *successfully* made it to the heavy gun control zones is that heavy gun control is not the only option, that free states with gun rights exist and flourish. You may consider the delivery mechanism ugly but...hey, we don't have a whole lot of options remaining. Even Faux News gets guns screwed up a lot (coughBILL-Ochoke) and the rest are horrendous.

---

As to reactions in Tucson AZ: somebody I know and spend time with told me something funny a few days ago: a couple of times now they were some distance away from me and overheard the exact same comment about me: "oh yeah, this is Arizona...".

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