An online petition urging the Republican National Committee to allow guns at their convention this summer has collected more than 45,000 signatures.
The petition reads, “In order to ensure the safety or your supporters, delegates and all attendees at the convention in July, you must call upon the RNC to rectify this affront to our Second Amendment freedoms and insist upon a suspension of the Quicken Loans Arena’s unconstitutional ‘gun-free zone’ loophole.”
Despite Ohio’s open-carry laws, federal law authorizes the Secret Service to “prevent firearms from entering sites that protectees are visiting,” according to an article from CNN.
A spokesman for the Secret Service said Monday that they will not allow any person unaffiliated with the Secret Service to carry guns into the event.
I, however, disagree with the decision of the Secret Service. They should permit the participants and attendees of the Republican National Convention to carry weapons into the Arena.
After all, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week the Senate won’t consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee unless that person is approved by the National Rifle Association.
If any symbol more appropriately belongs to the Republican Party than the elephant, it’s a handgun and an NRA sticker.
So if the Republican Party is bought, paid for and controlled not by their constituents, but by a single nonprofit organization, then those constituents should at least be able to display the fruits of that organization’s efforts. This means, as the petition notes, securing the rights and freedoms supposedly afforded them by the Second Amendment. The level of support for this idea, in reality, should testify to the misguidance and, in my view, the lunacy of the gun-fanatics within the Republican Party.
In the rather unlikely, but admittedly possible, event that someone wished to use a weapon to harm one of the presidential candidates at the convention in Cleveland this summer, they would be stopped by the Secret Service.
The Secret Service has checkpoints where they will be searching for firearms. Their level of training and expertise suggests to me that, under their watch, no guns will enter the Arena.
Republicans, though, must think they’re a better level of defense than the Secret Service. They must actually believe NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre when he said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
These petitioners must not believe the Secret Service are good guys or that they’re not good enough guys.
Either way, their persistence demonstrates their arrogance when it comes to their capabilities with a weapon. And I’m quite sure their arrogance is misplaced.
Nevertheless, the state of Ohio has open-carry laws on its books. However unfortunate I think that may be, it is the law in the state where the convention will be held.
I see no reason why, at the vehement request of responsible, decision-making adults, they shouldn’t be allowed to utilize the law to fulfill their “Second Amendment freedoms.”
thshowal@indiana.edu
@TherinShowalter
