Gun Happy Texas Is Off My Travel List

A Brief Comment from Doug Draper

Posted January 4^th, 2016 on Niagara At Large

Yee Haw! Bang! Bang! Bang! We sure in hell showed those gun control varmints the way out of this state, didn’t we! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Minus the shooting, that’s pretty much the way it reportedly was across Texas this first day of January, 2016 as large numbers of Texans celebrated a state law that now allows them to openly have guns hanging out of their belts in public.

This right-in-everyone’s-face show of lethal force is in keeping with what many Americans interpret to be their 2^nd Amendment right to own and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution to own and bear arms, and with a position advanced by the National Rifle Association – one of the lobby groups that runs the United States government – that the more people who carry guns on school campuses, in shopping malls and just about everywhere else, the safer they will be.

Now call me more yellow than a rose in Texas, but I wouldn’t want to be around the next time a gun is fired or the backfiring of a car is mistaken for a gun shot and hundreds of people pull heaters from their holsters and start blasting. Could be a recipe for almost anything that moves being riddled with holes and I’d rather not risk having my 15 seconds of fame come down to my name being read from a victims’ list on CNN.

And how is a person in a movie theatre or shopping mall supposed to know if someone they spot coming in with a gun is just a regular gun nut or one of those nuts who wants to make himself famous for perpetrating another mass shooting. What if they find out later he was just coming back from the washroom?

Apparently other U.S. states in the south and mid-west are so impressed with how far Texas has gone to let Americans exercise their 2^nd Amendment rights that they are getting ready to move in the same direction. That despite any executive orders U.S. President Barack Obama plans to sign in coming days to tighten access to guns – orders Republican leaders promise to tear up the minute Obama’s final term in office ends a year from now.

Given that, I know I have no interest in visiting a state where tens of thousands of people outside of professional law enforcement officers are wandering all over with loaded guns hanging out of their belts. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who lives in a world outside of that gun culture who feels that way.

But I double anyone in Texas or any other state that follows with laws that allow millions of their citizens to openly wander around with guns will care about any drop in visitors.

If tens-of-thousands of gun-related deaths each year – punctuated by mass shootings of children and people with developmental disabilities – isn’t enough to cause Americans to re-think the monstrous number of guns circulating in the country, nothing will.

However, if I were the President of Mexico and Donald Trump gets elected President of the United States this coming November and moves ahead with building that wall along the U.S./Mexican border, I’d be tempted to ask Trump to make sure that wall works both ways as a protective barrier – especially if Trump expects Mexico to pay for it.

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