Video game critic Anita Sarkeesian cancelled an engagement to speak at Utah State University after receiving death threats, and the authorities refused to prevent anyone carrying firearms from entering the auditorium.
Sarkeesian has become nationally prominent for criticizing video games for how they portray women, and how graphically violent they are.
Some sick jerk sent an anonymous email to the university threatening that if Sarkeesian's appearance were not cancelled, "A Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out." The email was signed "Marc Lepine." In December 1989, Marc Lepine shot and killed fourteen women and wounded ten women and four men at the École Polytechnique, an engineering school in Montreal, Canada. Go and read the news story at the Salt Lake Tribune, it's very disturbing how graphic the email was, and how weak was the official response.
I think we need to look much more critically at the open-carry movement in the US, in which the 2nd amendment right to own firearms is shorn of the responsibility to be part of "a well regulated militia" and, even worse, trumps everyone else's rights. Remember Joe the Plumber (I think it was) saying a few months ago that his right to own a firearms trumped the right of your child to be safe in his or her school?
What I think open carry is really all about is "normalizing" the presence of firearms in public, making it easier to approach and kill (or wound) opponents of the right. Who started open carry? Who conceived the idea? Who promoted it in state legislatures? I think it was ALEC. How in the world does open-carry fit in with getting government off the back of corporations? Well, the initial answer would be, "It doesn't." But if Ian Welsh is correct - and I think he is - then the answer is much more sinister.
....the plan is aristocracy, and the plan is succeeding. There is aristocracy by right (billionaires) and there is aristocracy by position (corporate officers), and there are important retainers and local gentry (centi-millionaires), but the well-being of the majority of the population is not a concern
What is a concern is making the system self-perpetuating: locking in high profits, making sure that the heirs of the aristocracy keep the gains, and making sure that labor never gains the ability, either politically or through economic pressure, to upset the game. -- The Coming Global Recession and the Remaking of the World
Progressives and the left are adamant in refusing to face the sad and horrible fact that violence does, indeed, work. Even just the threat of violence. I think it's an open carry organization in Wisconsin which announced its members would be at voting places, to check on the activity of people who had signed the recall Walker petitions. What chilling effect will that have on election turnout by opponents of Walker? Does the right to carry firearms really trump the right to vote? Oh, we're told, there is no "right to vote" enshrined in the Constitution and its Amendments. By whose interpretation? Antonin Scalia?
And why did elites want to militarize our police forces? Why is the Department of Defense studying the possibility of social unrest resulting from climate change? Why do elites want the NSA to suck up every email, every phone consersation, every cell phone GPS identifier? Why do things look more and more like Orwell's 1984 or worse?
Let us not forget there were plenty of warning signs before the Civil War erupted. Besides all the threats of secession repeated over and over and over again by the Fire-Eaters of the south, there was organized violence that attempted to sway elections in Kansas and Nebraska beginning in 1854. In 1859, a number of southern states began to organize, arm, and train special "militia" units for, for, hell, I forget what damn excuse they used then. I'm pretty sure it's all recounted in one of the three or four books on the secession movement in a particular state, if you want to look it up (for example: The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847-1861, by Henry Thomas Shanks, 1971, or Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina, by Steven A. Channing, 1974).
One of the most controversial things Abraham Lincoln ever said:
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen -- Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance -- and when we see these timbers joined together and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding, or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in -- in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck. (Lincoln's "House Divided" speech, June 1858)
I'm drawing my own conclusions about the relationship between the constant attempts to smear and sully liberals and progressives - the bile and hatred is astonishing - and the radicalization of open-carry the past few years. And I don't like what I'm being forced to conclude. Am I just being paranoid?
Or far-sighted?