Vin Suprynowicz

Touring the country to peddle his collectivist schemes, President Barack Obama made stops in New Hampshire and then in Phoenix, Ariz. during the month of August.

Entry into the actual halls where Mr. Obama speaks is carefully controlled, the better to create for the TV cameras the visual image of cheering throngs.

At several of these events, a handful of those who gathered outside the halls to protest wore firearms. No one got arrested, since no one brandished their firearms in a threatening manner. They just wore them, safely slung or holstered, which is still perfectly legal in both New Hampshire and Arizona.

Some folks are wearing their guns more and more these days — especially in such public forums — to get their neighbors accustomed to seeing them. The theory, not unreasonable, is that if you don’t want to lose a right, you’d better exercise it — visibly — from time to time.

The fact that many Americans need to be re-acclimatized to the normalcy of an armed citizenry was quickly revealed by the nearly hysterical rantings from the Left after the TV cameras picked up fleeting images on these legally owned and carried civilian firearms.

Cartoonist Ted Rall writes a column that’s syndicated by the Universal Press Syndicate.

Mr. Rall’s Aug. 27 column begins: “Two weeks ago, a right-wing man protested outside the president’s healthcare meeting in New Hampshire wearing a gun strapped to his leg. Lest we miss his point, he carried a sign that called for the shedding of blood in a new revolution.

“A week later,” Mr. Rall continued, “a dozen men appeared outside Obama’s appearance in Phoenix brandishing loaded guns. ‘We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote,’ said one, who carried an AR-15 military-style automatic rifle. You read that right — they threatened to use guns to annul the results of the last election.

“Cops stood by and watched. The Secret Service did nothing. Strictly speaking, these mooks are allowed to openly carry guns. Which is fine with me. I’m a big fan of the Second Amendment.

“It is, however, horrifying to watch goons threaten to assassinate the President of the United States and get away with it. Make no mistake: guns don’t have anything to do with healthcare. This is a revival of Klannism. A black man is president, and the good ol’ boys don’t like it. That’s what this is about: putting him in his place. Which, if they or someone they inspire has their way, will be six feet under.

“God. The smirks those turds wear!” Mr. Rall went on. “Run a Google Image search on ‘Klansmen’ or ‘lynching.’ Same ones.”

Interesting. I chatted with 28-year-old machinist Chris Broughton of Phoenix, the man who wore the aforementioned AR-15 slung across his back outside President Obama’s Aug. 17 appearance at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, there. (Needless to say, it’s the kind that fires one shot each time you pull the trigger — not an “automatic.”)

Is Chris Broughton one of the “same ones” you’ll find if you “Run a Google Image search on “Klansmen” or “lynching,” as Mr. Rall suggests? Only if you look at the guy hanging in the tree. Chris Broughton is black.

Let’s also note, for the record, that just because a presidential candidate received a majority of votes certainly does not mean said president has any power to impose an unconstitutional enactment (such as nationalizing the medical or insurance industries), even though it be “through the strength of the majority with a vote.” Pointing this out hardly means the speaker aims to “annul the results of the last election.”

Mr. Rall should probably go back on his medications. Others should ask themselves if they’re terrified when they enter a police station or an Air Force base, and suddenly realize large numbers of people there are armed.

Inmates in the government schools, nowadays, are taught to trust the government and distrust our neighbors. But as John Taylor Gatto points out, we DO trust our neighbors with our lives, every day. Gatto’s example is called “universal motoring.”

Walk down the shoulder of a moderately busy country or suburban road. In the course of an hour, hundreds of cars whiz past you, traveling at 45 miles an hour, missing you by only a few feet. Any one of those drivers could yank his or her wheel and send you flying, killing you or crippling you for life. Do we shriek in terror, run and hide till someone takes all those tons of hurtling steel away from a bunch of total strangers, many of whom have “minimal government training,” since “There’s no way to know if any given driver is sane or insane”?

Of course not. Even though many more Americans are killed every day by automobile than by firearm.

The reason our neighbors don’t kill us is because they have no reason to, and they’d go to jail if they did — not because they lack the tools.

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I mentioned I spoke to Chris Broughton on the phone, shortly after his brief “30 minutes of fame” outside the Obama appearance in Phoenix Aug. 17.

Was he surprised by the little media tempest?

“I expected maybe a little thing in the little local news. I didn’t think it was going to turn into all this. It kind of caught me off guard. …

“Apparently some people were taking photos of me and then going to the police and saying ‘I just saw someone carrying a gun,’ and the officers were saying ‘Well, yeah, it’s an open carry state.’ So what I did was definitely educational.

“MSNBC actually went so far as to edit the video so they (viewers) could only see the rifle, you couldn’t see if I was black or white, and then they used that video when they were talking about white supremacists and Nazis, talking about people hating a black president. They purposely cropped the picture so they couldn’t see I was black as they used it over this report about dangerous racists and white supremacists. In the original video my whole body was visible in the video the whole time. …

“There’s one point I’ve been meaning to make with all these different reporters,” Chris concluded. “People are up in arms about me doing something perfectly legal at a time when our president is traveling the country trying to sell an unconstitutional health reform. …

“Aren’t the hospitals required to treat anyone in the emergency rooms? If they weren’t required to treat people then the costs wouldn’t be spread to us, right? If you think about it, we already have universal health care. People are whining because health care costs are out of control. That’s because the producers are paying for those who aren’t producing. Universal health care will just be more of the same. If more people get free care and the rest of us pay for it then prices are going to go up, not down. Anyone can figure that out.”

I guess to some that’s scary, racist talk.

Phoenix talk radio host Ernie Hancock, who was also armed that day, tells me that a group of marching, chanting guys carrying bullhorns and wearing SEIU union T-shirts approached the corner where he and Chris were standing outside the Phoenix convention center on Aug. 17.

“They were telling people to get out of their way,” Ernie says. “They acted like that was their street corner, like they had it reserved so they could stand there where the TV cameras could see them. But as soon as they saw a bunch of guys already standing on that corner, wearing guns, they got really quiet. One of the cops came up to me later and said, ‘You guys did the right thing.’”

Barack Obama has thousands of guys — many with real machine guns — to help him promote his vision for a socialist America. But one guy with a semi-automatic, safely slung, standing outside on the sidewalk calmly answering people’s questions: That’s scary?