I have largely stayed out of the whole “bring your guns to the rally” movement. I think it’s dumb and I think that it is a form of intimidation, but I’m not too worked up about it.
But I did get worked up about Joe Wilson calling the President a liar on the house floor during the joint session of Congress. I think that it was distasteful and I would have been offended if it had been done by Dennis Kucinich to George Bush. It is wrong.
What I find interesting is that Joe Wilson, an elected representative and presumably an upstanding citizen otherwise, lost control of himself and did something regretful. Surely, Mr. Wilson knew on some level that what he was doing was against the rules that he was supposed to live by in that chamber. Yet, he couldn’t control himself.
I wonder how much of a leap it is to think that an ordinary citizen that shows up at a town hall meeting with a gun on his hip might lose his sense of reality momentarily as well.