People going about their regular business in Portland, Maine were caught off guard yesterday when a man was seen strolling alongside them with a fully loaded assault rifle in hand.
Portland police received more than 65 calls Monday reporting that a young man was walking through the Parkside neighborhood and the Back Cove area with an AR-15-style assault weapon. Justin Dean, 24, insisted he wasn't making any sort of statement but rather had the loaded rifle for protection while exercising his Second Amendment rights.
Dean broke no laws, but advocates on both sides of the gun-control debate said he could have picked a better way to exert his rights than by carrying a weapon in a densely populated neighborhood and on a popular walking path.
This is a subject wherein subtlety is not a strong suite of mine, and I suspect that anyone who feels that they need to carry an M4 (easily mistakable as an AR-15) with a 30 round clip for protection is most likely an unstable person or, as Bob calls it, a micro-phallus sufferer. It's either a penis extension or you're an astonishing paranoiac.
Conservative personalities like Limbaugh and Coulter regularly claim that liberals have somehow neutered Americans through feminism. Limbaugh refers to this as the "wussification" of America. But tell me the last time you saw a bleeding heart liberal carrying a combat rifle around a crowded public square for protection.