A guy walks into a bar…

And gets shot.

How’s this for crazy?

Two States Legalize Guns in Bars - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com: "Two States Legalize Guns in Bars
By Robert Mackey
Even though gun-rights advocates in the Senate narrowly failed on Wednesday in a vote to greatly broaden the freedom to carry concealed weapons, two states acted last week to make it easier for armed gun owners to hang out with drunk people."

I’m not your typical liberal. I’m mostly in favor of private gun ownership. My sane position is that people do have the right in the USA to own and probably carry fire arms. But that right should come with responsibilities such as mandatory registration of the weapon and of fired shells for ballistic checking (see TV shows if you don’t understand). In addition gun owners should be licensed and the licensing should require safety and proficiency training and testing. If you own a gun for hunting you should know how to hunt and if you own if for protection you should know how to kill a fellow human.

This is basic stuff here: If you don’t know what you’re doing with a gun you’re more likely to shoot yourself or a loved one than a deer or a burglar.

My less sane position is more extreme than the NRA. I think gun possession should be mandatory. Every citizen should be trained in fire arm use with militia level training. Every one should have at least one weapon.

(This is the more reasonable part, now I get to the weirder part – the one that really makes my friends uncomfortable. I’m not sure, myself, how far in my cheek my tongue resides on this, especially given the theme of this post.)

Not only should everyone have a gun, they should be required to carry one at all times. Never know when it will be needed.

And the weaponry should not be limited to hunting rifles and target pistols. Every personal weapon in our arsenal should be legally available. This includes automatic weapons, anti-tank and other artillery piercing weapons including RPGs and anything else a person can carry or mount on his or her car.

This isn’t so much to protect us from criminals. I’m one of those folks who are more fearful that if we take away our citizens’ guns then only the police and military will be armed and we’ll be defenseless against a military coup or police state.

This may just be vestigial ‘60’s paranoia. Back then we thought the government was building camps for the anti-war radicals (or more accurately – those terrifying “YOUNG PEOPLE”) and that a round-up was imminent. After a while that seemed ridiculous, but then Dick Cheney became Vice President and actually set up camps and made de facto law that the President could lock up whomever he wanted to and throw away the key. Cheney, being one of the remaining unindicted co-conspirators from Watergate (actually he was a conspirator wannabe) just proves that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.