Rednecks, guns, and stickers

There were two gun rallies in the D.C. area yesterday. One, held in Virginia, featured a bunch of people with loaded pistols strapped to their waists, and loaded rifles slung across their backs, to show their love of the Second Amendment, and probably to compensate for some really small penises.

Or, as one organizer put it:

"Let me hang out my shingle," Mike Vanderboegh shouted to the 75 armed men and women at Fort Hunt Park in Alexandria on Monday morning. Vanderboegh, leader of the "Three Percent" movement, a gun-owners' rights group, slammed down a brick on the stage bearing the Roman numeral III.

This was a reference to his call for his followers to "break the windows of hundreds, thousands of Democrat Party headquarters" after health-care legislation passed. Some of them did as they were told.

"I was trying to get the attention of people who are pushing this country toward civil war, that they should stop before somebody gets hurt," Vanderboegh said of his brick-throwing campaign.

Sure, because the people making it so that more Americans have access to quality health care are pushing the country towards civil war, not the armed thugs advocating intimidation tactics.

Anyway, with the retard psychos safely quarantined in Virginia, thanks to D.C.'s anti-carry laws, the city played host to a far less frightening group of gun nuts. There were no Hitler signs. No talks of armed rebellion or the rapture. Just a bunch of good ol' boys (and girls) letting the government know it can't take their guns. The fact that no one in the government--least of all, Obama--really seems to give a shit about taking their guns, didn't appear to matter to anyone.

But it was a pretty friendly crowd. Aside from a couple of scowls from people who noticed I wasn't wearing a sticker (I'll get to that in a minute), it was a relatively laid-back affair. They even had a rock band. I didn't catch their name, but their signature hit seemed to be called "The Second Amendment Song." I'm not going to lie. It was kind of catchy.

If I'm being generous, there were maybe 400 people at the rally. Unless you're using Republican math. Then it was around 1.5 million.

Everyone at the rally was wearing a sticker like this one. In a lot of cases, people were wearing multiple stickers all over their bodies, kind of like you would when you were 7. The added benefit--aside from informing people that guns save lives--is that rally attendees could tell who didn't belong there by their lack of stickers. I had no stickers, and got more than a few suspicious looks.

Things I Never Thought I'd See In a Million Years for $1,000, Alex: What is a pink banner at an ultra-conservative rally proclaiming that "The Black Panthers Were Right"?

No, I'm not really sure what a guy dressed up as George Washington has to do with guns, either. But he and his fellow cosplayers were catnip for the media.

And there was a decent amount of media around. At one point, one of the rally organizers on the stage announced that he was going to do an interview with Al Jazeera, and if he wasn't back in five minutes, to send help. Now, even if you accept the evident premise of his joke--that Al Jazeera is somehow working with, or otherwise affiliated with Muslim extremists--why would they hurt him? The Taliban and the Tea Party are basically the same thing.

Suppose you're a gun nut, and you're attending a gun rally in D.C. But you have a small problem: That darn, Second Amendment-hating city government won't let you bring your machine gun! What do you do?

Obviously, you make a fake gun out of wood, paint it, and sling it across your back! (And then you think to put bright orange letters on it, so you don't accidentally get shot to death by a panicked cop who thinks it's real.) Problem solved!

To paraphrase a line from Sneakers, I could have been in the NRA. But they found out my parents were married.