mgregg85
Member
I'm glad he wasn't busted but it sure sounds like he wanted to be. I would have considered that sign threatening if I was guarding the president. I'm willing to bet he had a secret service guy watching him the whole time.
You are arguing presumed INTENT and not reality. Fortunately the 'thought police' are not quite among us yet.Threats are illegal. The threat this man made inheres in the COMBINATION of several things:
He was armed with a deadly weapon.
He was carrying a sign indicating that tyrants need to be killed for the good of the republic.
He was in proximity to someone he considers a tyrant.
I agree 100%.I am a strong believer that goading law enforcement into an inevitable reaction is bad PR for the millions of responsible gun owners in the US. Seems like the local police in New Hampshire are pretty supportive of the RKBA until the law abiding citizen includes a veiled threat of violence. What then can happen is entirely predictable and offers yet another opportunity for the average citizen to discount our message as responsible gun owners.
I feel the same way about the goth teenager who walks around in a black t-shirt with the word F**K in big block letters. The constitution gives them the right to do it, but I don't like it and it forces me to turn away and stereotype all goth kids as jerks.
The constitution gives them the right to do it
Does anyone dispute what the man's message really was? Regardless of the quotation's noble heritage, IN THIS CONTEXT, it was either a summons or a threat to kill the President of the United States, was it not? And a legal right exercised in the wrong context is no longer legal; examples should be easy to imagine.
Yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater is the classic example.
rbernie said:We may not all agree with his point, much less his means, but the fact remains that at least he demonstrated that it is possible to be openly armed in public without being nutzoid or a raving threat. The more that the anti-RKBA folks hyperventilate over this, the more that they actually present that argument for us.
What if he had shown up carrying a sign reading "sic semper tyrannus"... would that be any worse than the Jefferson paraphrase?
The logic would go like this: if the Second Amendment is diminished in the presence of a Presidential visit, maybe we should be worried when a congressman is in town. Then, perhaps the fact that an alderman lives down the street becomes a justification to disarm others. And so it builds, until each and every concern about the potential for the misuse of a gun is sufficient to prohibit being armed.
On Hardball, the man admitted that his inspiration for the sign came from Jefferson's quote.
Plus, there was that recognizable snake emblem.
Jefferson was making that quote in reference to overthrowing the government, just like this man was.