What is the nation coming to when people want to deny city-dwelling children their illegal right to carry a handgun in public. Yet that is in fact what the right-wing has now uncovered.
It seems that Attorney General Eric Holder once suggested during the 1990s that we use a TV ad campaign to convince kids in Washington, DC that illegally carrying around a gun might not be a good idea. Mind you, this was around the time that DC was the murder capital of the US, and it was illegal for anyone to have a gun. According to the Republicans, convincing grade school kids not to walk around illegally packing heat is an Orwellian violation of their Second Amendment right to blow each other's brains out over a game of hop-scotch.
Next thing you know Holder is going to be against kids sticking their fingers in light sockets.
I was living in DC around the time Holder took his infamous stand against grade school kids defending their lunch money with a Colt .45. I remember sitting outside what was then a cafe called The Pop Stop, on 17th street, just east of Dupont Circle. It was a trendy gay neighborhood, and I was having an iced coffee with friends when two young African-American kids walked by. One was really young, like 6, and the other looked to me to be about 8. Maybe 10, tops. There was an older African-American man, grandfather type, wearing a suit and tie, looking like he dressed up simply because that's what proper people do when they go for a walk, and wearing those hats that grandpas love to wear, and he was scolding the 8 year old for something, waving his finger at him. The 8 year old was smilingly nastily at the old man, and clearly in an effort to intimidate him, lifted his shirt and flashed the hilt of a handgun that was stuffed in his waistband.
This was before the age of cell phones. There were easily a dozen of us just sitting there, feet away, watching this unfold. We didn't know what to do. So we sat there helpless as some child threatened an old man with a gun, in public, in front of a crowd of onlookers.
Damn you, Eric Holder.
