No really, we're the Good Guys.
It does seem like Target would be an obvious—well, you know—
for the Open Carry nuts.
On Wednesday, the social media-savvy Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America began sharing images of men carrying semi-automatic rifles inside Target stores, including in Texas, where the group Open Carry Texas held a recent demonstration to point up the right under state law to display such guns in public.
It appears to be the usual crowd, and I still don't know how we're supposed to tell them from an armed group intending to knock off the armored truck idling at the store entrance or from a group of Sekret Muslims walking into a public place to commit an act of terrorism or from any number of lunatic mass-murderers who all looked like perfectly stable people, if you saw them in public, compared to this crowd. But the point is to demonstrate that true patriots need to be able to kill a bunch of people very quickly, no matter where they are, if they decide people need killing. Even while shopping for Oreos and baby toys.
"We like baby toys!" one open carry supporter chimed in on Facebook.
No shit, Sherlock. That's been the prime point of contention here all along. But I've never seen a baby demand a high-capacity pacifier magazine, because even they have limits.
"Hey Mom's Demand Action! Suck on this!" said another.
I see the goal of the "protests" remain the same, which is to make sure that American parents and other non-insane people can see the scabby-looking manchildren and know what they should be sucking on. Good show.
Again, I don't get it. These guys want a nation that looks like Somalia with more strip malls and higher brand penetration. They literally think that everyone should be wandering around with rifles explicitly designed to kill the people around them, and that everyone should should be fine with that except when someone pulls a trigger on purpose or by accident and then, well, all the other patriots nearby will just sort things out as it happens. You're not supposed to see a group of guys march into a bank loaded for bear and think I should duck out of here, you're not supposed to think anything of it until the bullets start flying. "Oh, I see. They were here to rob the bank after all. I wish there had been some obvious tell that I could have used to gain valuable run-like-hell time." Can't judge them based on how they're holding their weapons, either, because apparently you should also be able to put your finger right up to the trigger and we're still supposed to figure that you're the Good Guy With a Gun.
If these guys had their way, people would be getting shot in public places all the time. More so, I mean. Not just a hundred times more "dropped weapons" and other not-really-accidents, but the inevitable escalation of events when somebody's "dropped weapon" results in the We Like Baby Toys guy wetting his pants and hastily returning fire from behind a stack of boxes in the nearby shoe department. It's a patently absurd position. It's a position that demonstrates, as one poor sap at the NRA himself fessed up to before being slapped down again, the insanity that would result from the NRA position on things actually coming to pass.
You're not allowed to carry a lit kerosene-soaked torch into a public restaurant because No Shit, people. You're not allowed to wander around your local mall pushing a wheelbarrow filled with gasoline, even if you promise you won't light that match you're carrying, because the rest of us aren't Freaking Stupid. You don't get to brandish grenades while telling your ideological enemies to "suck on this," you don't get to go to the movie theater with your really-well-trained-I-promise mountain lion, you don't get to visit your local fast-food restaurant with a glass jar of sarin gas strapped to the top of your head while telling the people around you that there won't be any problems so long as everyone treats you nice. We are not stupid. There are many, many laws against carrying a dangerous thing into a public place where said dangerous thing is almost certain to cause multiple deaths if it is actually used, because the general pretext of civilization is that we do not "need" to be able to kill random strangers at a moment's notice wherever we go, not even if it makes us feel better.
Except guns. Make any of those things a gun, and you're allowed to, and there are interest groups and lobbyist groups devoted explicitly to allowing you, and the sole and entire reason you are allowed to carry a gun into Target and not a blazing lit torch, a mountain lion, a grenade or a bottle of sarin gas is just that none of those groups have paid out enough money to make it happen. Make it a gun, and suddenly you're a goddamn self-certified patriot. It's a notion so stupid that you have to be daft in the head to even consider it, and kudos to the Open Carry jackasses for demonstrating what it actually looks like in practice.
