Speaking of guns
by digby
When I wrote my piece below about the freedom loving citizens whose loaded guns force the rest of us to kow tow or risk being shot, I hadn’t read this:
Speaking at a rally in Iowa for Republican Senate candidate Sam Clovis on Friday, Gohmert recalled that he had initially been blamed after Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) had shouted “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address in 2009.
“Somebody yells ‘You lie!’ and the camera goes on me!” he told the crowd, adding that he “knew” the president wasn’t telling the truth about an immigration bill.
“And so Joe was right,” Gohmert continued. “That’s not how a country goes forward effectively, with a leader that will play those kinds of games. You know, truth is too important.”
The Texas Republican then pointed to an 1798 John Adams quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
“It only is fit for people who cling to their God and their guns, you know?” Gohmert offered as an interpretation to the delight of the crowd. “So, it is deeply troubling if you get in these tough situations and you can’t trust your leadership.”
There you have it.
I don’t think the people who carry loaded weapons around in public necessarily believe that. They just don’t care about those who feel it makes their already tenuous lives more dangerous and certainly less free. When someone is armed it makes it impossible to engage them in the kind of heated and contentious debate that’s required for a free society — and guaranteed by the constitution Louis Gohmert believes was only written for people like him.
Gohmert is a fool, we all know that. But he blurted out a truth nonetheless: the people who insist on being armed as a “demonstration” or a “protest” are using the second amendment to quell dissent. And they are forcing unarmed law abiding citizens to behave in different ways toward them than they behave with others — less freedom for them, more for the gun owners. Once you put convenient, lethal force in the mix, liberty becomes a zero sum game.
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