Leave guns at home
Weapons at peaceful demonstrations are being used only to intimidate and frighten.
Government-ordered closings and personal restrictions decreed in Texas and around the nation to battle the new coronavirus pandemic over the past two months have sparked acts of civil disobedience and perfectly legal protests.
Cries of oppression and tyranny may seem a bit overblown when it comes to issues regarding access to bars, gyms and hair salons, but the frustration is understandable. We should never grow blasé about the threat of government overreach or abuse of power. The Constitution does promise “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The problem comes when these supposed “peaceable assemblies” are wreathed by men carrying rifles prominently slung on their shoulders or at their waists. The military-style firepower is often made more ominous by the fact that the civilian rifleman is wearing camouflage, a flak jacket or other types of body armor.
Such menacing displays are clearly meant to intimidate and threaten and have no place at a peaceful demonstration or rally. It threatens our democracy and the Constitution many of the gun-toting protesters claim to revere.
Make all the signs you want, wave all the flags you can get your hands on and shout your objections and slogans to the high heavens. But, to paraphrase Johnny Cash, “Don’t take your guns to the rally.”
It’s about the right to free speech, yours and others’. The presence of at-the-ready firearms has a way of stifling that discourse, not to mention heightening the risk of armed confrontation that could end with a lot of people, including unarmed bystanders, dead or wounded.
One of the scariest situations came in early May when armed protesters made their way inside the Michigan Capitol, pushing face-to-face confrontations with police and occupying the Senate gallery where they stood, weapons at their side, above the lawmakers.
It was all legal but always just one misstep away from setting off a deadly riot that could have spread well beyond the Michigan statehouse. Those with guns were not there “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” They were there to incite fear and subvert the democratic process through a show of force.
That is not how things should happen in this country.
A similar event happened less than a week later in Odessa when six men with loaded “AR-15 type weapons” showed up to help a bar owner reopen her business against a state order by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The men were arrested for possessing firearms on a property licensed to serve alcohol, Ector County Sheriff Mike Griffis said, making it clear at a press conference that he is as progun rights and as anti-governmentintrusion as anyone in Texas.
“We’re not here to violate anybody’s Second Amendment rights,” Griffis said. “I’ve been saying it for years, and people will tell you, all the good citizens need to arm themselves because all the bad citizens already have. I believe that.”
Griffis noted that he doesn’t agree with some of the closure orders, but, “Why do you want to use intimidation as a way to keep law enforcement from doing what we’re supposed to do? If you don’t like it, run for governor.”
The sheriff ’s empathetic stand didn’t shield his office from threats or complaints that the Second Amendment had been violated. But even the state’s notoriously lax gun laws do include a common-sense restrictions on bringing firearms to bars. Texas is one of 44 states that allow rifles to be carried pretty much anywhere else in public, which may have deterred a crackdown at demonstrations so far.
But state law does prohibit the display of a “firearm or other deadly weapon in a public place in a manner calculated to alarm.”
What other calculation could there be for bringing a lethal weapon to a public demonstration except to alarm and intimidate? Leave the guns at home.