Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Mike Weatherford was in the crowd when conservative blogger and former sports broadcaster Ron Futrell heckled comedian Bill Maher earlier this month at The Pearl. Futrell says he confronted Maher verbally after the HBO personality described Sarah Palin’s special needs childs as “retarded.”
Heckling is frowned upon, to be sure, but Weatherford covered the confrontation from a curious angle–he compared the verbal fireworks to modern mass shootings.
The episode points out that two trends in society are on a collision path.
One is our “everyone’s famous now” culture of Twitter, blogs and reality TV….If you want to try to engage or provoke Maher, you can actually heckle him on Twitter….
That other trend? Mass shootings in public places. One of them a theater….
I did know it was one day after the latest shooting rampage in Santa Monica, Calif. And though I was pretty sure this person was more akin to protesters who get themselves kicked out of campaign rallies or congressional hearings, a dark thought nonetheless took seed….
Logic mostly suppressed this notion. What are the odds, right? But it was still an uncomfortable stretch between the time Futrell got his first warning from Pearl security — after Maher bit back on the Halliburton heckling (Review-Journal columnist Norm Clarke had the details last week) — and the point where they finally gave him the boot.
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