Why Johnny Brought His Gun

A guy goes into a Kroger supermarket carrying a loaded AR-15 assault rifle.

Sounds like the beginning of a very bad joke, but it happened this week when a 22-year-old man went to a Charlottesville, Va., grocery with his handy assault rifle slung across his back.

People in the store, not surprisingly, freaked out and called the police, who soon arrived. I wonder what the confrontation was like, but in the end they determined that he wasn't planning to use the gun and had the right under Virginia law to be openly carrying his legally purchased weapon of mass murder in the store.

I wonder how this all would have gone down if the guy was black instead of white? But he looks enough like Tim McVeigh, and was compliant enough with the police, to assure his safety during the confrontation.


He's the young guy in the middle.

Most interesting, though, is the fact that the guy had a piece of paper in his pocket explaining why he had brought the gun to the store (his Second Amendment rights and all that). Why would he have put that paper there?

The only reason possible is that he knew he might end up dead and he wanted to be able to make his point from beyond the grave. He was preparing for martyrdom, hoping to be a headline on Fox News, the guy who died to make the live free or die case, literally.

Do we want people who are willing to martyr themselves having guns at all, let alone ones that can kill dozens of innocents in minutes? Might that not be a reason for a mental health evaluation and cause for prying the guns from his cold, living hands?