Carrying firearms to a protest meeting. And there was a report that she brandished it when pursued by a car, presumeably full of KKK types.

If I had a problem with you speaking up, I would just delete your comments. I could care less if you disagree with me. I might disagree back, but that’s about as emotionally invested as I’ll get with it.

I think that is good publicity. The only others that seemed to echo the opinion that this was a bad idea. is the strong anti gun loonies comments on various articles. Most have not mention it at all.

This argument is big in the gun community but not outside it,

MSNBC I think shot itself in the foot. How that will effect public opinion about guns, I do not know. Beside historically there has never been much fear of white folk having guns, just when black folk do it.

What I think is that MSNBC is doing a lot to push the meme of black racism on the part of the tea parties and anti health care elderly at these forums.

Of course I recognize that I think it will be good publicity for us is based on my bias as a gun rights supporter.

Really we have to see how the falls out as first opinion and reactions are often wrong.

I guess that Sebastians discomfort of OC activism will not be changed unless he sees sucess. I think sucess in this will be incremental. I do thing that Brady and Josh Marshall
response to Gibbs statement was priceless.

But I read often the lefts comments and often they think that our voices are larger than I think they are. I think the prevailing culture had adopted so much of leftest anti gun opinion , and the left thinks that conservative pro gun opinion has been adopted.

I guess our viewpoints reflect our fear of each other and may not be an objective viewpoint. We all live in our own fishbowls and echo chambers.

More than 50 years ago, at the age of 18 (and looking about 15) I learned that open carry was legal in our state, and I did for awhile. I remember carrying a S&W .45 revolver on my hip into the post office, and no one batting an eye. Yet with hindsight I still feel I “got away with it,” not that my legal rights were respected.

Since then I have been involved in court cases involving gun issues and I have prevailed. But I learned that having the law on your side is no guarantee that you will not be placed in a position where you have to pay through the nose to prove it in court. Something they don’t teach in middle school civics is that you have no more rights than you can afford, especially if your rights are politically unpopular in your community.

Open carry is still legal here, but I haven’t done it in well over 40 years, simply because I haven’t wanted to pay through the nose again to prove my rights exist — and without any sure guarantee I would prevail in whatever happened.

Maybe someone will quote the law to me and tell me I’m wrong and that I’ve only been oppressing myself out of fear and paranoia. But it is fear and paranoia based on some first-hand experience, and I believe I have been oppressed for all those years by community attitudes. We could make many analogies to blacks in the deep south “taking it” and supporting the illusion that “the darkies are perfectly happy” with Jim Crow laws and customs. I for one am taking my hat off to everyone who is standing up; I only hope some of them appreciate what a tough row they may have to hoe if local law enforcement forces them to prove their rights in court.

I’m going to assume you just didn’t see that comment while it was up as opposed to agreeing with it.

Or, you know, it could just be that I have an opinion of my own, and I happen to disagree with both of you.

Oh darn, there I go, speaking up again.

As I already wrote, I never attempted to indicate that Kopel is not without his PR expertise – but if you are going to appeal to authority, ensure you phrase the appeal appropriately, otherwise you will be referring to someone’s legal prowess when everyone agrees that legality is not in question here.

Whoops.

And be careful who you are accusing of “discounting activists”… from my perspective, someone went and did something amazingly ballsy, provocative, and activist-y, and not only did he pull it off, but he pulled it off amazingly successfully and effectively, and even with the White House begrudgingly ok-ing it. Strategery is all good and well, but it is bloody hard to argue with success (not that you obviously have not tried, and undoubtedly will in the future).

My point was that Sebastian thinks it is wrong to act in a way that might give the media ammuntition against us. As both Robb Allen and vssapresident have said, if we don’t give them ammunition, they’ll make it up anyway.

That is a lose, lose proposition….lose if we’re polite little mice or lose if we let them make it up out of whole cloth. WWNCD is not an option.

sv, III