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What could go wrong?

Published by digby on November 23, 2015

What could go wrong

by digby

So, some armed yahoos stood outside a mosque, wearing bandanas over their faces, looking for trouble. They didn’t get it. But they made their point:

About a dozen protesters — most carrying long guns, some masked and one with his mother — lined up outside an Irving mosque on Saturday. They had come from as far away as Hunt County to the green-domed complex. To “Stop the Islamization of America,” as the mother’s hand-drawn sign urged.

A pickup tooted on its way down Esters Road, not the first or last driver to endorse the message. Right behind the truck, a sedan pulled out of the Islamic Center of Irving lot, where afternoon prayers had just finished, and blasted Arabic music as it passed.

Two men on the sidewalk mocked the song, distorting foreign lyrics into gibberish as the car sped away. Then they huddled in the cold around their cigarettes, guns and flags, waiting for another passer-by to pay attention. It was a strange protest, held at a strange time in a suburb strangely relevant to America’s brand of anti-Islamic politics.

“We tried to talk to the mosque before we did this, but they wouldn’t return our messages,” said David Wright, dressed in black all the way from his backwards baseball cap to the barrel of his tactical shotgun. “So here we are.”

Wright said he organized the rally in the wake of an Islamic terrorist group’s massacre of Parisian civilians this month. Like millions of Americans, he wants to block Syrian refugees from U.S. shores, lest they replicate the attack here.

But like a fraction of those millions, he was convinced that Irving’s mosque had established the country’s first Islamic court earlier in the year—a false rumor that started online but grew in popularity after Mayor Beth Van Duyne made it the focus of speeches to Tea Party groups.

“They shut the illegal court down,” Wright said, incorrectly. “And then, they threatened to kill the mayor.”

Thus, the guns. A protester with a bandana over his face showed off his AR-15 to traffic. A 20-year-old who wants to join the Army and ban Islam in the United States carried a Remington hunting rifle while his mother held the sign.

“They’re mostly for self-defense or protection,” Wright said, eyeing his 12-gauge. “But I’m not going to lie. We do want to show force. … It would be ridiculous to protest Islam without defending ourselves.”

That sounded a bit ridiculous to David Palmer, a City Council member who wandered down to the protest in sweatpants after a concerned mosque member told him about it.

“Does it look like there’s any threat here? Nobody’s even close to them,” Palmer said, standing in a parking lot where police cars nearly outnumbered the four or five mosque members who watched the spectacle.

“My initial impression was they were using them for intimidation,” Palmer said. “I doubt that they’d be happy if some of the Muslim churchgoers here showed up at their Christian church, their Baptist church, their Methodist church tomorrow morning with rifles slung over their shoulders.”

Palmer said the police chief personally warned mosque leaders about the rally. They in turn urged their worshippers to steer clear of the group, which calls itself the Bureau of American Islamic Relations and had recycled some of the signs it took to a Richardson mosque last month, on a national day of protest against Islam.

The worshippers largely took that advice, ignoring the protest until it broke up after a couple hours. The Muslims in the tiny audience declined to share their opinion — instead offering praise for freedom of speech and variations on “no comment.”

But back on the sidewalk, a man who wore a name tag that read “Big Daddy Infidel” and was afraid to give his full name worried about the day he would be forced to use his hunting rifle to take a human life.

“You know, I hope 10 years from now, we just stood out here and froze to say what we wanted to say, and nothing ever came of it on either side,” he said quietly. “I hope the supplies I have in my house, the food and the water and medical supplies, I have to use up in my retirement years.”

But, he concluded, “This stuff is among us. People are blind if they don’t think it is.”

Yes, dangerous “stuff is among us”. And it’s carrying weapons outside places where people worship.

I wrote this piece a while back about what the gin proliferation zealots are really doing when they use their guns to make political points:

“Look at my gun!” Why NRA’s scary “open carry” craze is not about freedom

Freedom for a man with a gun trumps freedom for parents of kids who feel endangered by him. Our scary new reality

  • by Heather Digby Parton 
  •  May 7, 2014 
Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.  
For instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however. Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park.  Freedom for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel endangered by him. 
After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in  Newtown where a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political point. There were no incidents.  Why would there be? When an armed citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon.  
Just last week open carry proponents decided to have one of their “demonstrations” by going into a Jack in the Box en masse, scaring the employees so badly that they hid in the walk-in freezer. The so-called demonstrators seemed confused by the response of police who assumed there was an armed robbery in progress and dispatched a phalanx of cops.
“We’re not breaking the laws,” Haros said. “We’re not here to hurt anybody. We’re not trying to alarm anybody. We’re doing this because it’s our constitutional right.”
Haros, who believes openly carrying firearms helps police, said citizens should know that the demonstrations will continue.
“It’s just for safety purposes,” Haros said. “Officers can’t be there at all times. We understand that. They can only do so much.”
So this fine fellow believes he is doing this to protect the public. And while they don’t wear uniforms so you can’t identify them, have no specialized training in the law, are not bound by police protocols or answer to the authority of the democratic system of government of the people, they have taken it upon themselves to look after all of us because the police are busy. (And presumably, unless you are wearing a hoodie and they think you look suspicious, you probably won’t get shot dead by mistake.) We used to have a name for this. It was called vigilantism. One can only hope that when a “bad guy” really does show up at your Jack in the Box or Starbucks and one of these self-appointed John Waynes decides to draw his weapon you’ll be as lucky as the innocent civilian who narrowly escaped being killed in error at the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.  
All of this is allegedly being done to protect our freedoms. But it’s only the “freedom” of the person wearing a firearm that matters. Those parents who want their kids to feel safe in a public park aren’t free to tell a man waving a gun around to leave them alone, are they? Patrons and employees of Starbucks aren’t free to express their opinion of open carry laws when one of these demonstrations are taking place in the store. Those Jack in the Box employees aren’t free to refuse service to armed customers. Sure, they are all theoretically free to do those things. It’s their constitutional right just like it’s the constitutional right of these people to carry a gun. But in the real world, sane people do not confront armed men and women. They don’t argue with them over politics. They certainly do not put their kids in harm’s way in order to make a point. So when it comes right down to it, when you are in the presence of one of these armed citizens, you don’t really have any rights at all.  
You can see why they think that’s freedom. It is. For them. The rest of us just have to be very polite, keep our voices down and back away very slowly, saying, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir,” and let them have their way.
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