Man Flaunts Gun at Little League Game, Tells Parents “There’s Nothing You Can Do About It!”
Welcome to the world in which most conservatives seem to want to live. One where everyone has a gun holstered at their hip like we’re back in the days of gunfights at the O.K. Corral and disputes were often settled with armed standoffs in the streets.
Recently, a man in Georgia scared the hell out of parents and children as he walked around the parking lot at a local park showing his gun off to anyone he encountered, while telling them, “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
A parent, Karen Rabb, said, “Anyone who was just walking by, you had parents and children coming in for the game, and he’s just standing here, walking around saying, ‘You want to see my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Then again, with Georgia recently passing a “guns anywhere” law which allows citizens to carry guns damn near everywhere, isn’t this exactly what they wanted?
Local law enforcement officials reported 22 calls to 9-1-1, but there was nothing they could do about the man flashing his gun because he had a permit and wasn’t threatening anyone. Though couldn’t the argument be made that a random guy walking around a park filled with children, bragging about his gun, was intending to threaten people?
Hell, wouldn’t it have been somewhat plausible that someone could have shot this guy? To me, a random guy walking around a park loaded with families while rubbing his gun in their faces would seem like a threat. Should we wait for him to open fire, killing people first, before “the good guy with a gun stops the bad guy with a gun”? I mean, that’s the “logic” conservatives like to use, right? Isn’t that what these “stand your ground” laws are all about? Feeling a threat and using whatever force you feel is necessary to respond to that threat?
Or if you want to talk about mental illness, isn’t someone flashing a gun to random strangers in a park, telling them that there’s nothing they can do about it, most likely suffering from some kind of mental illness? Should someone who stages a stunt such as this own guns in the first place?
But this is essentially the kind of society Republicans want. One in which it’s perfectly legal for a random guy to go around scaring the hell out of parents and children, flashing his gun, telling people that there’s nothing they can do about it.
Though I’ll still ask, “What if someone had seen this man as a threat and shot him?” Because personally if some random stranger was flashing a gun at me, telling me that there’s nothing I could do about it, I would take that as a threat.
