Yep - booze, testosterone, fear and ammo - just the thing a lot of Americans need to compensate for ...well, you know what I mean. Just when you think the country can't get any more lunatic you find:
More States Allowing Guns in Bars and Restaurants
Nashville - Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city's strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.
Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state's nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a new law -- one of the nation's first -- that allows them to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.
"If someone's sticking a gun in my face, I'm not relying on their charity to keep me alive," said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.
Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision....
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My father was a hunter. We often ate deer his hunt club killed (my speciality is vension ribs and roasts) and my brother was bloodied after his first kill, a ritual drawn from native American practices. His African-American hunt club was celebrated for hunting with white hunt club, one of the first integrated hunts in the area, which made the newspaper, complete with photo showing everyone smiling with their shotguns. We had guns in the house growing up; gun books, and now that my father is deceased, the guns remain in the same drawers, closets, and attics where they have been for years.
But never, never would he or any of the men he hunted with, black or white, carry a weapon in public, either open or concealed. Not to a bar. Or a grocery store. Not out of fear or defense or anticipation of trouble.
His generation which fought in World War II and which put food on the table with guns knew the best way to defend against crime and violence was to avoid it from the very first steps at the beginning, making good decisions about where and when you are going, following common sense rules for personal safety, and accepting that possessng a gun was overkill in random encounters. Ask Plexico Buress. Ask my 10th grade classmate who accidently shot himself in the foot. Ask my police firearms trainer brother who never discharged his weapon in 25 years of dangerous urban conditions of public service.
Ask me. I have been robbed at gun point. I know having a gun would not have allowed me to respond and only increased the likelihood of my being injured or killed. Ask my daughter. Attending a dance in her youth where young men began shoting, additional weapons would have only added more risk, solved nothing, and endangered her escape.
This transfer of an Old West mentality to modern times is pointless, provocative, dangerous, and weakens the social fabric. Individual rights activists for gun rights have gone beyond social bonds. They defy and deny statistics and anecdotes, for the rush of delusion and power their brains are flooded with from the fetish of carrying guns.
In 2008, right after Barack was elected, the run to buy guns and ammunition was so extreme, demand so high, that ammunition makers ran out of bullets. For some calibers there was a six month wait. Sadly, all of these weapons and bullets are still present in the society. And like any material good, they are waiting to be consumed and used - a gun and bullet is not a T-bill to be saved and conserved.
When the same people who have argued for the change of laws began the next round of arguments ratcheting up offical support for the use of guns in new defensive situations or as one politician suggested as a "second amendment remedy," then we will realize the self fulfiling prophecy that allows those with guns to justify, train, and come for us.
--Walter Rhett
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