To the Gun Rights Enthusiast Who Stole This Reporter's Notebook

I have to admire your intrepidity. There it was, inside the breast pocket of my blue-striped button down shirt, and then it was gone. I had gone over to your side to try to find someone to talk to after, shall I say, my rather awkward introduction to y'all. The typical gun rights enthusiast talks a game of respecting constitutional rights but has a visceral hatred of those poor ink-stained wretches like myself who try to practice the rights guaranteed us under the First Amendment.

Yes, I know, I know. The Oath Keeper threatening the security guard with retaliation at the Concord stop of the Bloomberg bus rally, during a near riot touched off by your fellow gun enthusiasts, claims with the righteousness of the religious savant  that the Second Amendment is the primary social charter, the cornucopia  from which all other liberties flow, including the Oath Keeper's First Amendment right to threaten to disseminate among the true believers the security guard's picture and news of his perfidious act trying to protect the Bloomberg traitors.

Covering yesterday's Nashua City Hall protest by pro-gun control activists, I was rather astounded by the turn-out of the Second Amendment true-believers. Did you guys have a permit, too? Their permit required them to stay within a circumscribed area around the statue of JFK, who was killed with a mail-order rifle. By commanding the sidewalks, you were able to obscure your blood enemies in your battle for unrestricted access to blunderbusses, but was it legal? They were complying with the law; were you?

Neutral Stand

I try to take a neutral stand when I turn out for one of these events, at least when my feet are on the ground. Both the websites I publish with encourage the expression of a point-of-view, but typically, I do not express that POV when I'm covering an event. Even in print, I like to maintain some journalistic objectivity as I can write an opinion piece when I want to.

I like to hear both sides of the issue, but it is hard to hear the other side -- in this case, the gun rights counter-demonstrators -- when they are belligerent  and seemingly close to going out-of-control, as I witnessed in that near-riot in Concord and witnessed at times today. I'm sure the armed policewoman on hand helped keep things to a manageable level; the Concord police didn't arrive so soon.

There's a saying: It's hard to stay neutral on a moving train. It's hard to stay neutral when you're shocked to see a man holding a submachine gun with a round in the magazine peeking out of an open breech that just needs a slap to lock and load and start firing. Hard to stay neutral when you can't believe that such an extreme form of "open carry" is allowed in your home state, the state where you took the oath to defend the U.S. Constitution when you joined the Army at the Manchester MEPS a generation ago, the day you were shipped off to Ft. Lost-in-the-Woods in the state of Misery. Shocked to realize that that constitution, that society you were sworn to defend didn't include foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics with loaded submachine guns.

Yet, after I had had my contretemps with the various guns rights enthusiasts who  not only flirt with the bright line of political sanity, but seem to cross over it regularly, I was willing to parley. I had cooled off. After all, I am a Gabby Giffords type of guy: I support the Second Amendment, I am a gun owner, and hey! I once belonged to the NRA until Wayne LaPierre decided to make it a phalanx of a hoped for right-wing revolution.

I, too, used to write the NRA-dictated form letters mailed to me and send them off to my representatives. I had been reading "Guns & Ammo" as well as my "American Rifleman" since junior high (as we called middle school then), when I was a member of the Junior NRA.

Gabby Giffords

But that was a long time ago, and when I read about the Gabby Giffords shooting, I didn't even have any idea that a pistol cold hold 30-rounds. A 30-round magazine? That is insanity, an invitation to tragedy, tragedies which have happened too frequently since I joined the Army and Ronald Reagan became my commander-in-chief.

Are you proud of your fellow guns rights "enthusiasts" who circulated vicious, hateful posts about Gabby before her trip to the Granite State, when you and your kind took to your Internet message boards to round up a posse of open carry nuts to stage a counter-protest at the Puritan Room? Do you count that as one of your victories, you brave defenders of a constitution that I, a former legal editor, see you don't understand?

Intimidation

Are you proud of bullying the young pro-gun-control woman with the clipboard? Of going up and yelling at her, "Answer me a question! ANSWER ME A QUESTION?" with a pistol strapped to your belt, your face a mask of belligerence Proud when, after she didn't answer -- having been told, as you know, not to engage with your kind to avoid escalation of the conflict your sought -- you went back to your comrades, trumpeting, "THEY WON'T ANSWER!", your indictment of all the gun-hating liberals, as if you've won some major victory?

You didn't even understand what I meant when I said to, "I was told as a teenager: 'Never argue with someone with a gun.'"

You thought that was some validation of your battlesome behavior. For that's what your "open carry" show of arms is: an attempt at intimidation.

Deft Hands

By that time, things seemed to have cooled off between us when I went over to a clump of gun enthusiasts and wrangled an interview with someone who was not foaming at the mouth. (All of the Second Amendment supporters aren't into intimidation, not even those who openly carry guns, like the armed father with his two little girls, one of whom was accessorized with her own rifle.)

I had found my subject, but when I reached for my reporter's notebook in my breast pocket, it was gone. How deft must have been the hand that stole it. I didn't feel a thing.

My argument with you open carriers had been that loaded guns are unsafe. My point that I had been an Army training NCO who ran a shooting range and had worried about getting shot by one of my soldiers, if it didn't inflame the fire breathers, was answered with assurances by the more level-headed that an errant shot had never escaped from any of your firearms.  And maybe that is true, since whoever purloined my notebook had very deft hands. (You had answered in the affirmative when I asked you whether the pistol you carried was loaded, and assured me there was a round in the chamber and the safety was off. You seemed so calm, so level-headed; your words belied the initial impression of my eyes.)

But there is something that bothers me about the theft. Oh, not really the notebook itself -- if one of the Oath Keepers thought they were getting someone that would aid them with retaliation, I say "Good luck!" After an operation for a ganglion cyst on my wrist, I can barely read my handwriting myself. If said person can read my scribbling, please contact me and I'll hire you for transcription duty.

Playing God

No, it's just that it was an example of lawlessness, lawlessness masquerading as law unto itself. And an act of disrespect. You not only think you can interpret constitutional law, but you believe that you are the law. When someone has such a case of ego-inflation, what comes next?

You believe some Moses-like lawgiver came down from the Sinai of the old colonial state house in Philadelphia and brought these new united states its version of the biblical Ten Commandments, of which the Second is actually the First. How soon until that ego inflation balloons your head to where you feel you are god?

You've dreamed of sitting on His knee in the After Life and passing judgment along with him on those you despise. How soon is it until, in this life, you decide to pass judgment and play god, dispensing your divine justice? How soon until that breech is slapped and the assault weapon is locked and loaded?

After Concord and now Nashua, I believe that time is coming. And it fills me with trepidation. An alarm needs to go up and be heard from Nashua to Concord and to Washington, D.C. No more Sandy Hooks! No more Auroras! No more Columbines. No more massacres.

It's time for New Hampshire's open carry and stand your ground laws to be repealed.