Open Carry Laws Do Not = Poke A Badger With A Stick

Arizona has an "Open Carry" law, where you can walk into any public place, carrying a loaded firearm (including places that serve alcohol), as long as it is obviously a weapon - you can't try and conceal it or disguise it as flower bouquet or something innocuous. I've seen people carrying 45s, 357s, and 9mms at Target Stores, gas stations, and grocery stores. It's part of the "wild west" culture out here I guess, ok, I can understand that.

But when the democratically elected, legal President of the United States comes to your state, and visits it's capital, and the Secret Service imposes a 5 mile "no fly zone", deploys roof top snipers, flies in (2) C-130s worth of armoured limousines and decoy vehicles, what inspires a citizen, or 15 citizens, to walk up to the downtown convention center where the President is speaking to the VFW annual meeting with an AR15 over your shoulder? Heck, the Secret Service chased down, detained, and interrogated a pilot who flew from Mesa to Chandler, NOT near Downtown, but within the no fly zone's edge - and KJZZ the radio this morning said that seven pilots were questioned for violating the no fly zone in and around the nation's 5th busiest airport during the President's visit.

So a zealot carrying an AR15 (with a 20 or 30 round standard magazine), into a public area that is under Secret Service surveillance, is like poking a badger with a stick, or trying to lick a spinning fan blade, or shooting a hornets' nest with a paint ball gun, or walking into Peshawar in drag trying to hand out Bibles. These provokers are not a "patriots" as right wing blogs and commentators try to make them out to be. They're just the kind of inhabitants of this country who have too much time on their hands, who try to pick fights in bars (and who I stand up next to, and then they back down and cower for the last 20 years) and who are immersed in their own agendas so deeply that they do not understand view points that are different from their own. If they are truly "patriots" then, Mohamed Atta was a "patriot" too, he "fought passionately for" what he believed in, as was Benedict Arnold, Joseph Goebbels, Timothy McVeigh, and many others. A "patriot" doesn't have to twist their logic into such extreme gymnastics to justify their actions and their ideology.