New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” movement held a demonstration in Concord, New Hampshire on Tuesday. A somewhat larger group of gun-rights proponents showed up. One of the gun-rights demonstrators got aggressive with the gun-control people and the police, which got him tasered and arrested for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault. Needless to say, nobody on either side of this, or any other, debate should behave this way.
The person on the gun-control side who was the object of this misbehavior, John Cantin (whose daughter was “shot and killed by her husband in 2009 by her husband,” according to the New Hampshire Union-Leader) said of the gun-rights advocates, “They just weakened their cause and strengthened ours.”
I don’t know how much cause-weakening occurs when one hothead behaves badly at a rally, but Cantin might want to think about the damage his cause did to itself, when one of the names they read aloud as a victim of gun violence was… Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Who, let us recall, was (a) a vicious terrorist who was (b) shot by the police during a gun battle, but actually died because (c) his brother ran him over with an SUV in his haste to escape from the shootout.
Update: Mayors Against Illegal Guns has apologized for including Tsarnaev on their list of gun violence victims. According to the Union-Leader, they “relied on a list compiled by Slate.com of people killed by guns since the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.” Look where relying on Slate for information got you, kids.
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