This is primarily a travel blog in which I write about traveling in our motorhome. Our travels have

Nacogdoches, TX, United States
I began this blog as a vehicle for reporting on a 47-day trip made by my wife and me in our motorhome down to the Yucatan Peninsula and back. I continued writing about our post-Yucatan travels and gradually began including non-travel related topics. I often rant about things that piss me off, such as gun violence, fracking, healthcare, education, and anything else that pushes my button. I have a photography gallery on my Smugmug site (http://rbmartiniv.smugmug.com).

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Shootout at the OK Corral, I mean the GOP Convention

Today, Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote in The National Memo, “So why not guns inside the Republican National Convention? If it's okay to carry guns in schools, bars and churches, then why not in Cleveland? If Republicans in Iowa think blind people should have guns and Republicans in Alabama think little kids should have real guns, then why not all those Trump delegates?”


An NRA-sponsored petition to allow delegates to carry guns at the GOP convention was stomped flat by the Secret Service when it put its foot down hard on the suggestion. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hades of approval and I doubt if anyone really expected a different outcome. Still, the NRA and its 50,000 petitioners must have had a screw or two loose to even suggest it. The NRA argument was that Cleveland is ranked as one of the most dangerous cities in America and since “gun-free zones” are “the worst and most dangerous of all lies,” there would be minimal risk to some insane killer attempting to wreak maximum harm at the Convention if only the Secret Service and police were armed. They argued that if delegates were allowed to arm themselves, no person would attempt a shooting at the Convention. Maybe no person in his right mind would, but some insane killer wanting to shoot up the place wouldn’t let an army of armed delegates stop him from trying. Can you imagine the amount of collateral damage inflicted during what would probably go into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest indoor shootout? I don’t want to even think about it.

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