Drinking and shooting don't mix. Duh.
by digby
In other disturbing news about America, Texas wants to allow booze at gun shows. Even the NRA is against it. They can't come right out and say so, however. So they've come up with a clever ruse to fool the rubes into thinking they are expanding their "rights" rather than keeping drunken yahoos from killing each other at NRA events.
My piece in Salon today:
The NRA, however, sounds very skeptical about this plan. It put out another one of those “advisories” telling members that this new rule could “devastate” NRA events in Texas. They claim that it would prevent the Friends of the NRA from meeting at hotels and other places where alcohol is served (even if there was no alcohol at the event). This would lead to a shortfall in fundraising for the NRA, a truly devastating prospect. (They don’t say it, but it’s fair to assume this would have a devastating effect on the state’s economy as a whole considering just how many of these gun shows and other gatherings seem to be scheduled on any given day in Texas.) But they claim that the real rub, naturally, is the idea that these events would require that guns be “disabled” and that the responsible drunk gun owner would be unable to take his new weapon home that very day. (Undoubtedly, the founders turned over in their graves at the idea of such authoritarianism in the land of the free. What is this, Cuba?)
It would seem the NRA learned its lesson. Rather than telling its members that they are scaring the public by proposing to do something so ridiculously dumb that only a zealot or a fool would even propose it, they have very cleverly spun the proposed event to be an infringement on their God-given Second Amendment rights rather than an expansion of it. If they handle this carefully they may even get their responsible gun owners to hold some open-carry events at the alcohol control board meeting. They can demonstrate their reverence for the Constitution directly and make it clear that they won’t stand for having their rights restricted by allowing them to drink alcohol while they purchase their deadly weapons. That’ll show ‘em.