Quelle horreur! Somebody confiscate those awful things, quick!

The guys at TalkingPointsMemo.com, a highly partisan (pro-Democratic) news site, have been hard at work trying to discredit ObamaCare opponents. They’ve mostly been repeating their party’s talking points, but throwing in some filips to express their own prejudices–for instance, referring to the “tea party” movement as “teabaggers,” a homosexual innuendo.

Another TPM prejudice is the urban liberal bias against guns. Twice now the site has attempted to sound the alarm about someone carrying a gun at a political event, only to discover that outside Manhattan, citizens’ exercising their Second Amendment rights are nothing unusual. First was Eric Kleefeld, breathlessly announcing:

Following a tense town hall meeting by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) in Memphis over the weekend, local TV reported that one attendee was packing heat and had been escorted from the room–which if true, would be a dramatic escalation in the increasingly confrontational health care debate.

Never mind:

However, TPMDC has learned that there was not in fact any threat made, nor was it a cause for immediate alarm in its full context.

While one attendee did indeed possess a firearm, he did so in accordance with the state’s conceal and carry laws, and was fully cooperative when asked to take it to his car due to a no-guns rule for the meeting.

As Glenn notes, “charges of ‘firearms incidents’ at Town Hall protests say more about lefty ignorance than about Town Hall violence.”

Honestly, I’ve been wondering when we might see something like this. Y’know, maybe people wouldn’t feel it necessary to carry to these events if Obama’s goon squads weren’t beating them up for crimes against the State — and the Left weren’t gleefully applauding that nakedly un-American development.

In that light, maybe more of us ought to be open-carrying to events where union thugs are in charge of “security” (info on state open-carry laws is here). Might go a long way towards establishing some civility and respect for Constitutional law and order.

And the sort of government-incited violence we’ve seen so far — and it continues apace, by the way — is precisely why we have a Second Amendment in the first place. It hardly needs to be said that that’s why the Left hates and fears it, and why they’ve come up with so many convoluted rationales to explain how the “shall not be abridged” part doesn’t actually mean what it so bluntly says, and that the subordinate clause in the Second is actually the dominant one.

One of their favorite subterfuges — “the Founding Fathers couldn’t have foreseen the destructive power of modern weaponry” — is perhaps more vapid and artless than the others; truth is, the Founders did foresee the rise of exactly the sort of tyrannical government they’re advocating. The Second was written so that we’d have a last-resort redress to prevent the authoritarian dreams of a petty would-be tyrant like King Hussein Obama from coming to full fruition.

But of course, open-carrying to town halls and the like just wouldn’t be fair — to liberal-fascists who think having union thugs do their dirty work for them by dealing out gang-thumpings is the appropriate response to protesters exercising their right to petition their representatives.

Taranto provides another example of liberal-media ignorance about gun rights, and winds up thusly:

These guys seem to think it’s “un-American” to exercise your Second Amendment rights as well as your First Amendment ones.

Well, duh.

Update! On the other hand, this might be an even better idea:

What if opponents of ObamaCare threw shoes at congressional backers of same? The left seemed to think that was an OK form of protest earlier this year!

Nah, wouldn’t work; can anybody really doubt that the very same people who applauded throwing shoes at Bush as “heroism” would suddenly discover that it was an unacceptable sign of lawlessness and disrespect now?