Time for Some Schadenfreude

There was an open carry demonstration in Richmond, VA, and only two people showed up:

More than 300 people were invited on Facebook to walk down Cary Street on July Fourth with handguns, rifles and other so-called “long guns” proudly displayed.

Two showed up — and they were the organizers of the midday event in the family-oriented Carytown shopping district.

“I don’t know why,” said organizer Jason Spitzer, 29, when asked to explain the low turnout for what he described as an Independence Day demonstration to “spread Constitutional awareness” of Americans’ Second Amendment right to bear arms.

“But even if nobody came I’d still walk,” the Chesterfield County steel mill worker said, holding a large American flag in his hands, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a holstered handgun on his hip. “It’s the Fourth of July and I love my country.”

But with turnout so low, the shoppers and diners along Cary Street weren’t quite sure what to make of the two-man march, which might very well have gone unnoticed were it not outnumbered by two television crews and a photographer in tow.

BTW, I'm with the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life on the appropriate response if some of the open carry terrorists show up to your school/restaurant/laundromat, leave the area immediately without making an effort to pay:

The questions that concerns me now is how we bystanders should react when people come into a store with guns. There really is no legitimate way of determining intent. Even if the people with guns are carrying a sign claiming to be activists (which they do not do), they could be lying, just setting us all up for slaughter. And since there is no way to know what is on their minds, all we have are our instincts, but as we all should know, our instincts are often racist, classist, and frequently mistaken. So, what should we do?

My proposal is as follows: we should all leave. Immediately. Leave the food on the table in the restaurant. Leave the groceries in the cart, in the aisle. Stop talking or engaging in the exchange. Just leave, unceremoniously, and fast.

But here is the key part: don’t pay. Stopping to pay in the presence of a person with a gun means risking your and your loved ones’ lives; money shouldn’t trump this. It doesn’t matter if you ate the meal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just received food from the deli counter that can’t be resold. It doesn’t matter if you just got a haircut. Leave. If the business loses money, so be it. They can make the activists pay.

Following this procedure has several advantages. First, it protects people. Second, it forces the businesses to really choose where their loyalties are. If the second amendment is as important as people claim, then people should be willing to pay for it. God knows, free speech is tremendously expensive. If it weren’t, I’d be reading this on ESPN during prime time, not posting this on Blogger.

Third, this proposal has the added advantage of taking the activists seriously. Most gun-rights activists describe a world of tremendous dangers. Guns, they repeatedly tell us, are the only thing between home invasion, rape, murder, and government intrusion. Okay, well if that’s true, then we bystanders should be equally afraid, and react instantaneously to keep away the chaos and the violence. We learned to be afraid from the gun-rights supporters. They have gotten everything they wanted.

This is an unbelievably appropriate response.