So far, Walmart stands behind your Second Amendment rights. First Amendment? Not so much.

No longer for sale on the Walmart website

The Walmarts of America are among the few places on the planet where you can enjoy the convenience, in a single shopping trip, of picking up a box of crackers, a jug of peanut butter, a six pack of something wet, a sniper scope, and, oh, say 500 rounds of ammo for your AK-47, all at the same store.

I mean, if you’re planning to hunker down in some well protected vantage point and pick ‘em off as they pass, while remaining well fed and happily hydrated, there can’t be a better place to enjoy one stop shopping. 

And after all, didn’t God give us the Second Amendment just so we can stay armed and blow away people who are — you know — asking for it?

But if you’re planning to advertise your fondness for guns, perhaps you’d better shop somewhere else.

On the Walmart website, where you can buy lots of shooting accessories but not guns, probably owing to variances in state laws that are too difficult for an Internet sales bot to interpret, you could still, until recently, buy a T-shirt  that advertised that you liked guns expressly because they could shoot genuine people.

Not that the T-shirts were actually encouraging you to go out and do some random killing. It’s just that one T-shirt, which had a check box for “GUN OWNER” and another for “VICTIM” with a check in the owner’s box made it perfectly clear what your firearm is for.

Another T-shirt, expressing an attitude more than an application, bore an image of a set of crosshairs with the legend, “Gun control is being able to hit your target.”

Notice I’m using the past participle when I talk about the T-shirts.

According to Advertising Age, the T-shirts were offered on the Walmart website by third party vendors, but taken down after Walmart faced some, uh, incoming fire from critics.

Walmart has also taken down a third-party offering of a T-shirt that advertises, “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.”

Presumably, you can still go into Walmart and buy a rope. For all I know, you might even be able to buy a tree there. Just as in various states, you can still buy your firearms, ammo and  accessories  in Walmart.

Walmart doesn’t care, just so long as you don’t go all talky with your First Amendment rights and begin shooting off your mouth or your T-shirt about it.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Guns, Trump, Cruz, open carry petitions, and a surefire (no pun intended)…a surefire way to insure peace among Republicans.

Imagine the Republican presidential convention if every

attendee carries one of these

I note, admittedly not without a slight frisson of sangfroid coursing through my veins, that there’s a move afoot to allow open carry weapons at the forthcoming Republican convention, and that people are petitioning for it.

Now it happens that there are also some rascally folks who have openly and unscrupulously theorized that the petitioners are trolls. Imagine that! They say the petition is there to embarrass the Republicans into opposing one of the sacred principles of their own platform — specifically, support of an unfettered, unregulated, unpoliced, unlicensed Second Amendment right to, uh, blast bad guys off the face of the earth for, uh, self-defense.

According to that theory of trolling, the Republicans will be such silly sissies that they will be terrified of all those guns in their midst and oppose open carry even as Republican legislators and judges try to force it on schools and other places where the hoi polloi and their young children mingle. 

Nonsense! Republicans are red-blooded Americans who were given their right to open carry firearms by God Himself. I know they will get behind this petition — which will fill their convention hall with good guys with guns, thus rendering themselves safe from terrorist, communist, gay activist, socialist and possibly even dadaist, surrealist, and impressionist attacks. With so many Republicans openly carrying, the convention can’t be anything but completely peaceable. 

Little wonder that as of this posting, over 41,000 red blooded Americans have already signed the petition.

And little wonder Donald Trump says he is seriously studying the proposal. In fact, before you read the next paragraph, you should sign the Republican Convention open carry petition, here.

You’ve done that? Good for you. But before you go away, let me make a modest proposal concerning history, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. That’s Burr on the left. You can find Hamilton on any of the $10 bills in your wallet. Or at right.

Aaron Burr. He knew how

solve a dispute between

high-ranking politicians

Alexander Hamilton.

During his duel with Burr

he missed. Burr didn't.

Both men had a dislike for each other that rivaled, or came close to

rivaling, anything festering between Trump and Cruz today.

In the end, Hamilton and Burr settled their differences the conservatively manly way — and remember, you Federalist Originalists, both dudes were founding fathers. In 1807, Hamilton and Burr fought a pistol duel. Burr won. Hamilton lost. And if two consenting founding fathers did it, it had to be constitutionally protected.

Given the dispute between Trump and Cruz over whose wife is uglier and who did or did not have a little tart — or a few little tarts — baking on the side, not to mention something about spilled beans, I think there’s only one way to settle their dispute so that the rest of us can get some sleep. Yes, I’m talking about the old-fashioned way. With a firearms duel.

Hamilton and Burr used front-loading pistols. But technology has advanced, and as the NRA will tell you, there’s no reason the average joe shouldn’t be walking, or driving around, or lazing on the couch with an automatic or semi-automatic assault weapon equipped with a 30 bullet magazine.

So that’s what I propose for the Trump vs. Cruz duel to the death. And both guys are so brave and macho, I’m sure neither of them will wimp out of the contest. 

Afterwards, the winner can go to the Republican nominating convention, openly carrying a firearm. Because with so many good guys armed to the teeth, just as the Republican party has been advocating, nothing can possibly go wrong.

Wanna get plugged full of bullet holes in a murderous and panicky crossfire? Hoo hoo! Does a chiropractor-turned-gun-school-guru have a bank for you!

Dr. Ignatius Piazza owns a firearms handling school where he is the…umm, well let’s call him a headmaster. He sells his courses and a bunch of other things, including political opinions and e-mail lists of his subscribers. Sign up for e-mail from him, as I did a couple of years ago, and you’ll start getting not only "Only five days left!" promotions to to attend his courses, but also communications addressed to “Dear Patriot” if not to your first name, from a variety of right wing causes, crazies, and fundraisers. For example, I’ve been getting a fairly steady stream of nonsense recently from Rand Paul.

Hey, it’s a free country. And it doesn’t hurt, I suppose, to teach firearms handling to people who already have firearms. It’s the political horsefeathers that come with Piazza’s appeals to improve my gun skills that get my goat. (For the record, I was trained on the .45 caliber Colt pistol, the now long-outmoded  M-1 Rifle, and the equally outmoded 30-caliber Browning machine gun, decades ago in my military days. I haven’t touched a firearm since.)

Recently, I got an e-mail from Piazza praising the Chappell Hill Bank in the town of Chappell Hill, Texas. For what? For encouraging its customers to walk into the bank packing iron, including concealed iron – licensed concealed iron, of course. Piazza even included a newspaper article quoting the bank president, Ed Smith: “No damn yankee is going to tell us what to do.”

Well, Ignatius, Ed, I'm truly grateful to both of you. I think it’s just marvelous that you warned me. Personally, now that I know the bank’s rules,I think I’ll do my banking someplace else. I can see the scene:

Robber walks into that Chappell Hill bank, yanks (no pun intended) yanks out a gun, and announces a stickup. From various corners of the bank, twenty customers and tellers (who are also encouraged to carry heat) start firing. If you happen to be somewhere in the middle of the bank floor, say on the way to make an inquiry of a teller, or to see a bank officer about refinancing your underwater mortgage, do you know what you are?

Right. You’ll be delicious with a couple of slices of ham and some mustard on rye bread.