Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan may not have realized the controversy that would follow in her wake after she suggested the Greensboro Coliseum — a city-owned facility — probably shouldn’t be selling AR-15s at the annual gun show. In light of the Parkland massacre and all.
But maybe she did, and she didn’t care.
She dropped the notion on social media after talking with her teenage daughter about the shooting that claimed 17 students and faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: a child stunned because no one is doing anything about this, and an adult who thinks maybe she can.
The blowback was immediate from the gun nuts — who need to be differentiated from gun owners, who count the mayor of Greensboro among them. The nuts are the ones who are angry at the teenagers who survived the massacre, or Grass Roots North Carolina, a gun-nut group out of Raleigh insisting that Vaughan’s very suggestion itself is illegal, amounting to the regulation of the sale of firearms by a body without the authority to do so.
That may be technically true — GRNC will almost certainly file suit against the city, and it’s possible the National Rifle Association could get involved. We’ll leave that for the judges and lawyers to sort out.
But it’s also technically true that the Second Amendment does include the phrase “well regulated militia,” which really doesn’t speak to the zero-tolerance, “no-compromise” stance of the false patriots at GRNC and the NRA.
Someone must stand up to these bullies — besides teenagers, that is — who have hijacked our national sensibilities — yes, at gunpoint — when it comes to arming our most paranoid and fearful citizens with the weapons of war.
We’re proud to see Greensboro’s mayor hold this line, and applaud every council member who stands with her when they meet on March 20 to discuss the issue. We’re not banning assault weapons, AR-15s and other instruments used strictly to kill large amounts of humans at once. We’re just not going to sell them at our city-owned facility.
It’s not like you can’t get an AR-15 by the end of the week, anyway. Rep. Ted Budd will sell you one right now.
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