"It's My Party, And I'll Shoot If I Want To"*

This summer's Republican / New Confederate / Stupid / Shooter's Party convention in Cleveland will almost certainly be a wild and nasty affair, if the primary season on the Rethug side is any preview. There's a very good chance that the convention will be unable to nominate a candidate on the first ballot, thus making for a bitterly contested nomination and a lot of very angry people, regardless of who's nominated.

Perhaps this scenario and the often violent and hateful rhetoric coming from the leading Republican candidates has prompted the Party's poobahs to affirm a ban on firearms at the convention. Here's a Party that actively promotes whatever the National Rampage Rifle Association tells them to promote -- including arming teachers in schools, pushing open carry legislation, and doing away with "gun-free zones" -- having to tell their nuttiest followers to leave their guns at home. Not surprisingly, a petition is being circulated by some gun fetishists to allow the open carry of firearms at the convention, and it already has close to 30,000 signatures. Of course, the candidates are under Secret Service protection, so there's no way they're allowing guns in the convention, a fact that will provide a fig leaf to the Rethuglican leadership for not allowing their base to exercise their Second Amendment remedies.
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*apologies to the late Leslie Gore.