Armed right wingers show up at Obama event

[Tyguy]

well canadians are just socialists trying to get out. it's a surprise your country hasn't imploded from marxism.

"you can take our lives, but you can never take our medical bills!"

 

[CptStern]

our National anthem has exactly 3 instances when you're supposed to salute hitler syle. plus we have really spiffy uniforms:

 

[Tyguy]

*In a heavy German accent*

"The girl at the top right is smiling, kill her!"

 

[CptStern]

lol I had to look twice; I didnt notice they were "girls"

 

[V-Man339]

I didnt know it had been posted. i use a work safe browser that hides all images and video

This explains the image dump.

 

[Absinthe]

Well yr hardballs are dumb :arms:
From what I've seen, this is one of those things I won't enjoy. Asking Hard Questions is all well and good, but being an obnoxious jerk who interrupts a lot is just annoying.

While I agree that those videos are obnoxious, the people being interviewed simply do not provide straight answers.

The guy in the gun video babbles on about his rights. Okay, but why bring it to a ****ing presidential event? The answer is obvious and petty, but he doesn't want to provide it. In the one regarding Medicare, the interviewee can't give a straight answer on whether or not it's socialist. He immediately starts giving a roundabout explanation about something else unrelated to the question.

 

[CptStern]

This explains the image dump.

yes it does. I've said it a number of times and you people still dont believe me. I live in my own little video and imageless world

 

[xcellerate]

The guy in the gun video babbles on about his rights. Okay, but why bring it to a ****ing presidential event?

Because I dun seen dis one fellow on tv bout a weak ago who had his pistol strapped to his leg, and I wonted to be on duh tv to so I broughts out my rifle!

hai guyz, am I too late for the event?

 

[Tyguy]

that gun would bring down a dying star

 

[CptStern]

these are the only guns that should be permitted at these events:

"pull the trigger, I dares ya!"

 

[Murray]

Because I dun seen dis one fellow on tv bout a weak ago who had his pistol strapped to his leg, and I wonted to be on duh tv to so I broughts out my rifle!

hai guyz, am I too late for the event?
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/images-20mm022standingatangle-fp.jpg

And just how far is this guy planning to shoot?

 

[xcellerate]

And just how far is this guy planning to shoot?

somewhere between 0 and 3000 yards.

 

[Shakermaker]

Replace the AR-15's by AK-47's and it could be Somalia. America went weird after Obama was elected. Where were all those people during 8 years of Bush?

 

[CptStern]

up to their ears in sand?

 

[lord_raken]

lol the right to bare arms is stupid, it may of been a good idea back in the 1700's but not now. Thank god i don't live in america.

In australia, a normal citizen can not get automatic or semi automatic weapons, and you sure as hell can't walk down the street with a gun, you would be shot by the police with out question.

I'm glad I don't live in Australia. Why would they want to provoke any one? It would hurt their position. In America you have to fight for your rights and it you don't our government will take them away. If you want to stay free you can't just lie back and trust the government you have to watch them like a hawk.

 

[Eejit]

Yet lying back and trusting the government is exactly what the NRA and pals did when the Patriot Act was passed. Methinks they simply like having guns.

 

[lord_raken]

since you have no problem with this you must understand their motives. what possible motive could they have to bring assualt weapons to an Obama event. I'm extremely curious as to what the justification is. please do explain

There motive was to demonstrate against increasing gun regulations. They wanted to show that people who own guns care about their ability to carry them in public... so they did. They did it at a political event because it would get them coverage by the news agencies. And the type of weapon does not matter as long as they have the appropriate license for that weapon. And those "Assault" rifles were semi-auto just like handguns. Fully automatic weapons require a very expensive license, a background check, another expensive special permit for each weapon, and you go into a federal database.

You are suggesting that they were their to shoot people? they did not, they did not provoke, the secret service is not bothered buy their presence... the only people who were are just afraid of the BIG BAD SCARY GUNS!

If terrorist or angry people showed up to hurt Obama I guaranty that all those gun owners would use their weapons to protect the president and the unarmed civilians, because he is our president and though we dislike his policies he is still our leader.

I wonder what will happen if I come whit tons of visible rifles to a conservative gathering and do things like poitning the gun to the person speaking saying that "I was checking if the sights arent dirty"

They won't let you into the gathering armed. you have every right to carry a weapon on the street but political events are secure and the security at said events have every right to make you leave it with them at the door.

And if you DID do that you would be tackled by multiple security guards and spend a long time in a dark room being asked some very probing questions.

 

[Eejit]

There is both an edit button and a multiquote button. Though if you really cared about how your posts read you'd check your spelling I suppose.

 

[lord_raken]

There is both an edit button and a multiquote button. Though if you really cared about how your posts read you'd check your spelling I suppose.

thanks for the info... I will not go and find that little button. and sorry about the spelling, I will try to be more careful in the future.

Oh.. and when giving helpful advice... Try not to sound like a total DICK!

 

[lord_raken]

bu they would be taking my rights!

if a police take my gun from my hand its violating my right to freedom!

after all it said "the right to bear arms" so if I am bearing the arm and someone take it its violating my right of freedom!!1

and I guess that count as long as I dont kill anyone,so I can aim at anyone cuz I am a responsible gun owner

You are creating a false interpretation of my statement to make your own position seem valid. That is a logical fallacy, and just makes you seem petty and thick. Not saying you are but your manner gives that impression.

 

[lord_raken]

Private businesses are allowed to ban gun carriers from the premise, and you walk through metal detectors at sports arenas, museums, local political buildings, schools. These are all reasonable limits on carrying a gun. These places can often be targets for attacks, and it makes sense to minimize the risk in high risk areas.

The protesters were in appropriate locations for their protest and none of them could have posed a direct or immediate threat to the president even IF some idiot does think he can get a shot off he would be taken care of by the secret service before he could do any damage. The one you really have to watch out for is a sniper using a hunting rifle (not an assault rifle) shooting form a book warehouse.

 

[Atomic_Piggy]

Yet lying back and trusting the government is exactly what the NRA and pals did when the Patriot Act was passed.

Pretty much. I guess it was okay because it was "pro-gun" George Bush.

 

[Eejit]

Oh.. and when giving helpful advice... Try not to sound like a total DICK!

Now where would be the fun in that?

 

[AJ Rimmer]

Now where would be the fun in that?

Eejit, I can't begin to tell you how annoying it is that every single one of your posts now sound intelligent, well-educated, nicely put, passionate and wholly convincing, even if they happen to be none of those things, all on account of your avatar.

 

[Eejit]

Well it's a benefit you have enjoyed for some time now so it's only fair.

 

[xdrive]

I'm glad I don't live in Australia. Why would they want to provoke any one? It would hurt their position. In America you have to fight for your rights and it you don't our government will take them away. If you want to stay free you can't just lie back and trust the government you have to watch them like a hawk.

You glad you don't live in australia where the government isn't a bunch of power hungry fools, and where the parliament is elected by people and most of the time there for the people?

Also if the government did actually go crazy they can be impeach straight away, infact our government can be sacked for no reason at all by the governor general.

No guns needed.

 

[CptStern]

There motive was to demonstrate against increasing gun regulations.

nice try but no; it was a healthcare reform protest, not a protest on gun control

They wanted to show that people who own guns care about their ability to carry them in public... so they did.

again, at a healthcare reform protest? that makes NO sense whatsoever and sounds exactly like their own idiotic justification. bringing a firearm to protest gun control at a healthcare reform protest is an excuse. the issue isnt gun control. that would be like wearing a clown costume at a blacktie affair.

They did it at a political event because it would get them coverage by the news agencies. And the type of weapon does not matter as long as they have the appropriate license for that weapon. And those "Assault" rifles were semi-auto just like handguns. Fully automatic weapons require a very expensive license, a background check, another expensive special permit for each weapon, and you go into a federal database.

the semi-automatic/fully automatic distinction is stupid. what does that have to do with anything? both are capable of killing people dead

You are suggesting that they were their to shoot people?

yes if the need would arise. they wont come out and say it but they're excercising their 2nd amendment rights, and for once they're not ignoring the first part of it:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

so if they're provoked too far the implication is armed insurrection. personally I'd like to see this put to the test because gun nuts have long advocated they need their guns to overthrow the government. well now's their chance. I predict defeat within the week with massive casualties on the side of the gun nuts. I'll call it the Great Culling

they did not, they did not provoke, the secret service is not bothered buy their presence...

right, I'm sure they werent bothered with them because at all points throughout the event there was a dozen crosshairs aimed at their foreheads

the only people who were are just afraid of the BIG BAD SCARY GUNS!

guns are perfectly safe harmless tools carried by sane responsible people. :rolling:

no they had no reason to be intimidated by armed thugs at angry protests on HEALTHCARE REFORM. only a gun nut would find this perfectly acceptable. BUT GOD FORBID ANYONE WEAR A I HATE GEORGE BUSH T-SHIRT

If terrorist or angry people showed up to hurt Obama I guaranty that all those gun owners would use their weapons to protect the president and the unarmed civilians, because he is our president and though we dislike his policies he is still our leader.

lol at "if angry people showed up" they were already there, AND they're already armed. and lol at the thought of a bunch of armed rednecks figting "terrorists" attacking the president in butt**** idaho. you people are beyond delusional

 

[Tyguy]

^that plus the fact that these are the same people being brainwashed by the spread of disinformation by ass-clowns like glenn beck, michael weiner and rush limpdick....the same people who are still comparing a health care reform to nazi germany. all you have to do is wiki their names and look at their history.

let's see...michael weiner thinks most autistic kids are brats who havn't been told to cut the act out. beck is mormon so that will suffice...and limpdick, among MANY controversial statements, argued michael j. fox was was pretending to have parkinsons.

now i know you probably don't reinforce your ideals with the previous mentioned dickheads but a lot of people do.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Clearly these people are acting within the law. Earlier in the thread there were some comments on the exact wording of the Bill of Rights. But the Bill is perfectly lucid. It reads: "A militia being necessary...the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed." The first part before the elipsis is a bound clause, which means it is cannot stand by itself and is dependent on another 'free' clause which can. In this case the free clause is the statement that "the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed." The bound clause beginning with "a militia" represents a justification and reason for the assertion of the free clause (the commas are not particularly important because in the 18th century commas were often used differently and more freely than they are now). Throughout the Bill of Rights the word "People" is continually used to mean all persons, so the meaning of the 4th article is unambiguous. Because a militia is essential for a free state (it claims), every person has the right to bear arms. And as long as these people have licenses for the guns that they carry, there is not a legal problem.

But we all knew that, right?

And it hardly matters. The legal dimension is relatively unimportant. What is important is its symbolism, because protest is all symbol. When they go to a protest nobody expects to encounter an immaculately reasoned and comprehensive argument for a given point of view. Nor does anyone have time to make one. Instead, they will see people carrying flags and banners, symbols of a given concern; they'll see people turning their own selves and their movements into such symbols, and ultimately they will see thousands and thousands of their fellow citizens combining voluntarily to form an aggregate icon: the defeaning river of bodies which is the mass, the people, and the march.

When you participate in this symbolic exercise you better be damn sure you know your symbols. Practically speaking nobody is going to shoot those guns. But the practical dimension is as unimportant as the legal one. The weapons are symbols, and their meaning (in the context of American politics) is this: we do not accept that your government is sufficiently democratic or that it is upholding the rule of law, and we are therefore mandated - we have the right - to resist you with force. Here are our guns. We'll use them if we have to. And when we do it will be in our defence; in the defence of liberty, in the defence of a political system which enshrines liberty.

Of course, an alternate meaning of the symbol would be: "we do not accept democracy and will prevent by force any measure which we individually or as a paramilitary group do not endorse." But even among the craziest echelons of the right, I kind of doubt that's the case.

Now this is pretty crazy! We will fight the state if we have to? Is that a threat? Surely it would have been seen as one in the Bush years; if anyone had done this then I have no doubt the right would have branded them traitors and terrorists. On the other hand it's frequently part of a protest to coerce authority. Civil disobedience is about forcing the authorities to go through you; that mass of bodies is partly about showing rulers what they are up against. But a gun as a symbol is on a whole different level, a level of threatening armed and organised and lethal resistance. That's why so many people in this thread are appalled by it. To them the threat of violence in politics is a relic of a past (pfft) which is still alive across much of the earth - one where people are incapable or unwilling to resolve their political disputes peacefully in the realm of civil society - one where, instead, force rules.

I, however, am increasingly cynical about the meaning of force in our modern liberal western democracies. The US and the UK are already in the business of using force to control and coerce millions of people who live outside their borders. They have both helped to inflict a state of rule-by-force, a state they are so proud of having transcended, on various other countries. And as the horizon thunders with hints of material and resource collapse, of catastrophic climate change and the refugee crisis that would cause, I have my doubts about how long it'll be before they begin to inflict violence on their own citizens without any sufficiently democratic recourse. Perhaps - with the state of policing in both countries, with the increased practice of unaccountable surveillance, with what I would characterise as the enforced poverty of a great many people - they already have.

Consider Bill Ayers (Obama's pal) and the Weathermen. They conducted a campaign of property damage against the US government - not as 'terorrists' exactly, because not against citizens. Hell, the only people who died from their bombs were members of their own organisation! They caused many dollars worth of damage and they took that crucial step over the line of directed, intentional and deadly violence against authority. But nobody could accuse them of imprecision. Nobody could accuse them of harming even people that their own logic would conclude to be innocent (if you believe the facts are different then I would be interested to hear it, but it would not be relevant to this argument for the theoretical possibility of justified violence). So in the strictest and purest and most logical sense, weren't they justified? Against a government that was not only conducting a slaughter in Vietnam but one that was not sufficiently democratic towards its own citizens - one whose security instruments, the FBI and CIA, were later found to be taking unwarranted and unaccountable actions against the population. Indeed, Bill Ayers is still allowed to walk free upon god's green earth precisely because the methods used to find and arrest him were deemed illegal and contrary to the rule of law, collapsing the case against him. So in retrospect, and in the narrowest sense, wasn't he justified?

I say in the narrowest sense because sometimes justification requires practicality. If there's no evidence something will actually work, and create the effect you desire, there is in some way far less of a justification for it. That's a big component of my own uncertainty about whether, even in the Britian of today, directed violence would ever be warranted. After all, in practicality, things could spiral out of control and bring us to that state of force that's only in the recent past for parts of Northern Ireland. But in my opinion we don't have much of a democracy going on at the moment, and at the very least civil disobedience, non-deadly denial of purpose, is up there with putting your mark on the ballot sheet. Perhaps, in terms of democratic legitimacy, it's even above it - he who votes automatically endorses the voting system. But that's ungenerous, and practically speaking, we've got to try everything there is, haven't we? Even if when we come out of the polling station our fingers are stained with crude.

In the case of the American healthcare campaigners, the use of weapons is absurd. To spend the entirety of the Bush years (which were plenty coercive) angrily equating all dissent with treason and then to threaten violent resistance at the onset of even the slightest hint of change would appear to be the height of petulance. They must also be conscious of another meaning to their gun-symbols: "Obama will take away our guns hey look at our guns look at our guns THEY WILL NEVER TAKE OUR GUNS". But there is no danger that Obama will actually take anyone's guns, and he hasn't promised anything of the sort, which means they are deliberately filling the political arena with blatant misinformation and straw man arguments. And they're doing it in support of what? The private healthcare industry? Ridiculous.

Still, even though Obama's election is itself a small affirmation of democratic potential, he isn't likely to change much that is significant in the order of the world, he isn't likely to really reform the state into the state it needs to be, and he still may not really improve the lot and the liberties of the Americans under his care, let alone those outside of his country. I can't pretend to endorse the use of deadly weapons as symbols of deadly force. But neither can I pretend to be sure that, considered in isolation, it's totally unwarranted.

 

[V-Man339]

Sulk, you rock.

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

It's refreshing to read a large post that isn't inter-spaced with oh so many quotes. I read that and it was good.

 

[CptStern]

you hit on a lot of good points Sulky however I'm afraid it might be lost on those it would serve best. I'm also not sure violence is justified in any way in this particular case; the government isnt overstepping their bounds but that means little to people who have convinced themselves of this.

 

[jverne]

There is both an edit button and a multiquote button. Though if you really cared about how your posts read you'd check your spelling I suppose.

son of a bitch (no, not you)...there's a multiquote button??? and i find out about this after 5 years. ****


edit: hey is there any instant porn button i should know about?

 

[lord_raken]

@ Sulk: You posses a very clear understanding of the situation and present it in a very reasonable and level headed manner. I far as I understand your statement I agree.

 

[leib10]

Arizona has an open carry law; I see no law-breaking being done here, other than paranoid liberalism at work. Also, the thread title implies that the people carrying weapons were right-wingers, no proof on that (as if it's impossible for left-wingers to own firearms). Yes, they're in the presence of the President; there's nothing the Secret Service and local law enforcement couldn't handle.

Just another overreaction and thinly veiled attack by gun control advocates, nothing more.

 

[lord_raken]

BTW: how do you delete posts?

 

[Krynn72]

You don't. You deal with the shame.

 

[ríomhaire]

BTW: how do you delete posts?

You can't. You can edit posts for up to 24 hours after it's put up, but only mods can delete posts.

 

[Tyguy]

I see no law-breaking being done here, other than paranoid liberalism at work.

Nobody is arguing that they were breaking the law...read the entire thread

Also, the thread title implies that the people carrying weapons were right-wingers, no proof on that (as if it's impossible for left-wingers to own firearms).

The right wing is responsible for a high majority of gun advocates. Can you deny this? Of course democrats could have brought guns, but it's much more likely the people who subscribe to the gun advocacy party would be the ones carrying guns.

Yes, they're in the presence of the President; there's nothing the Secret Service and local law enforcement couldn't handle.

Like an assassination attempt? That has never happened...

Just another overreaction and thinly veiled attack by gun control advocates, nothing more.

Being concerned about nuts bringing firearms to a public venue is not a ****ing over reaction.

 

[bbson john]

When a civilian has to carry a weapon, the weapon is for self-defense. One does not need a rifle to defense him/herself. A hand gun is more than enough. Rifle is for offensive purpose.

Furthermore, if someone carries a weapon into such a large public event, what if the gun goes off accidentally? How many people will be injured? People will run amok as they think there is a terrorist attack, stepping on each other...