Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Secondly

A twenty year old man was arrested at a Springfield, Missouri WalMart, not for shoplifting, but for wearing a ballistic vest and armed with a loaded rifle. He referred to his merry prank as "a social experiment, designed to test his Second Amendment rights. 
Dmitriy Andreychenko was taken into custody and charged with making a terrorist threat in the second degree. This lead me to the obvious question: What would be a terrorist threat in the first degree? How close to killing people would one have to be before that line was crossed? When does a threat stop being a threat and become action? 
“I wanted to know if that Walmart honored the Second Amendment.This is Missouri," he explained. “I understand if we were somewhere else like New York or California, people would freak out.” He was carrying an AR-style rifle and had a handgun attached to his hip, which was also loaded. While in the store, he appeared to be taking a video of himself with his cellphone as he pushed a shopping cart. An employee then pulled the fire alarm to alert customers to leave the building, and an off-duty firefighter took him into custody until police arrived. 
I am curious why he didn't start with his First Amendment prank, which would probably have consisted of walking into a crowded movie theater and shouting, "Fire." But making sense of this kind of thing really becomes pointless when you start to reel through all the clowns out there making a point of carrying their guns into shopping malls and fast food restaurants. Last time I checked, there is no "common sense" dictated by the United States Constitution. James Madison probably didn't think it was necessary to include the Right to Breathe Oxygen or ban scary circus clowns from daycare centers. Some things really ought to go without discussion. 
But, since Mister Andreychenko and some others may have missed it, our country is currently being plagued by young men with automatic weapons and Americans are dying while we fumble around in the metaphorical darkness looking for that metaphorical light switch that will make the message clear: No one needs an assault weapon to shop at WalMart. No one needs to wear body armor to shop at WalMart. 
I don't remember which amendment to our Constitution guarantees the right to act like a putz. 

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