Political advocacy is hard. It’s boring, and there’s all those letters and phone calls. Joining gun organizations costs money you could be spending on Gadsden bumper stickers and Nickelback concert tickets. There’s no instant gratification when your friends can’t see you doing it.
On top of that, you leveraged your mortgage and overpaid for that AR-15 a few months back, and you’ve got to do something with it, right? Why not carry it around your local Capitol building? If somebody complains, you can say you’re “educating” people. You can go home and get fist-bumps from your friends and bask in your own sense of righteous ideological purity. If the folks who actually do the work for gun rights complain, they’re just sellouts who don’t get it. After all, you’re on a mission, right?
Well, that’s what a guy in Santa Fe chose to do this week. Now, Senators on both sides of the aisle are talking about not only banning guns from the Capitol building, but from any location in which “large numbers of individuals that gather for a very specific purpose.”
I really doubt anybody gets educated by these stunts. They might nod their heads politely, but they’re really just coming down off the “for a second I thought I was dealing with an active shooter” adrenaline dump. Now they just want the obnoxious guy with the gun to go away and leave them alone.
If this guy really cared about educating people, he could have printed up some pamphlets and handed them out. He could have requested a meeting with legislators, or he could have started a letter-writing campaign.
Of course, none of those things really generates hits on YouTube. If we’re to be honest, that’s what this is really about. And it’s not doing us any good.