Tens of thousands of good guys with guns
by digby
What could go wrong? I wrote a piece this morning for Salon about the NRA convention:
Of all the denial, delusion and hypocrisy among gun proliferation activists around the nation, this latest report from Rachel Maddow takes the cake:
The National Rifle Association’s annual convention kicks off in Nashville this week, with 70,000 people expected to participate in the three-day gathering.
Attendees can expect to find the usual NRA fare and exhibitors at the 350,000-square-foot Music City Center, but they shouldn’t expect to find functioning weapons. The Tennessean reports this week on the “multilevel security plan,” which includes an important safety measure: “All guns on the convention floor will be nonoperational, with the firing pins removed, and any guns purchased during the NRA convention will have to be picked up at a Federal Firearms License dealer, near where the purchaser lives, and will require a legal identification.”
The devil is in the details here. It is apparently common practice to remove the operational aspects of firearms on the floor of a gun show, one presumes in order to avoid the unpleasantness of someone accidentally killing a conventioneer. Maddow also reported that while the convention was going to ban operational firearms in the convention, it planned to allow them in the hall where the speeches would take place.
The NRA has gone to some lengths to explain that they are simply following Tennessee state law which allows those with a permit to open carry and also allows venues to ban firearms if it chooses. But let’s not kid ourselves: They would prefer it if they could let everyone carry fully loaded bazookas and M-16s, but they are restrained by the State’s jackbooted thugs from doing so.
Still it’s somewhat amusing that the National Rifle Association does not allow working firearms at their own convention, and that they would hold it in a state which requires gun permits and allows the banning of guns in public places. One would naturally assume from their propaganda that they would go someplace with looser gun laws under the assumption that their gathering would be the most polite convention in history, what with all the “good guys with guns” there to stop any “bad guys with guns.”
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