Arlington Police Lieutenant Chris Cook said residents should not feel too intimidated to report people carrying guns in public places.
'Let us determine what is lawful or unlawful,' Lt. Cook said Friday.
Lt. Cook points out it's against the law to knowingly file a false police report. But he said the greater fear is that citizens fail to report armed individuals, either because they feel intimidated or because they've become desensitized to guns on the streets.Let's face it, there is a good point to calling the cops if someone sees someone who looks like they shouldn't be walking around with a firearm if it was true that Jared Loughner was openly carrying prior to the Tucson shooting.
Open Carry is a stalking horse for a kind of DIY Governance whose goal is to systematically erode and ultimately destroy public trust in government — to return America to what the conservative movement imagines is its “pure,” pre-federal government state of natureThe whole thing is well worth a read
When the Founders looked for inspiration for the Declaration of Independence, they found it in the works of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and the Baron de Montesquieu — the so-called “Social Contract” theorists. These men argued that humans existed in a State of Nature where every man was his own judge and jury and where, therefore, little good was ever accomplished. It was stable government — or, as they called it, “Commonwealth” — that provided the basis for economic, political, or social progress.
What the gun nuts and Second Amendment absolutists are determined to do, in alliance with the Tenth Amendment fetishists, is to fundamentally undermine America’s social contract and the government upon which it depends – devolution to Hobbes’ description of life without government, a “war of all against all:”
…a time or war where every man is enemy to every man…wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.Which is just the way the Gun Lobby likes it. Because nothing pumps up gun sales like continual fear and danger of violent death.
