Paul Helmke on the town hall shooting in Missouri:
This last point deserves some more attention. One of the first times I got involved in a controversy with the gun lobby was when, as Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, I suggested that individuals not be allowed to bring guns into our City-County building. (The County, which owned the building, had just banned guns from the County Courthouse and I argued there were just as many contentious issues being discussed and decided by the legislative and administrative parts of local government as by the judicial part.)
The gun lobby saw this suggestion as an attack on their “Second Amendment rights†and responded strongly. As someone who had received death threats and been called a “dictator†because of other government issues, I knew that there were a lot of people who I did not want to see carrying guns into city meetings and the offices of city employees.
These incidents all highlight the tensions involved when individuals argue that their “personal liberty†outweighs the rule of law and trumps community policy as decided by our governmental systems.
Is Paul serious here? First off, government meetings are already off limits places to concealed carry in Missouri. Clearly this individual paid no attention to the fact that gun were prohibited there. The individual overcame two armed police officers stationed outside. Was a sign saying “no guns” really going to be effective against someone intent on mowing down town council? You almost have to believe that in Paul’s world, this isn’t satire:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7pGt_O1uM8[/youtube]
UPDATE: Eric at Classical Values has a good bit on this up here.
so he admits that, in his view, policy outweighs personal liberty?
I think in his world, it should. He’s a statist.
I keep leaving a comment ackowledging a ‘freshly laid, still-steaming pile of Helmke’, but for some reason the mods won’t publish it.
I wonder why….
:)
Paul was less than popular in certain parts of Indiana when he was the Mayor of Fort Fun. It has always been a mystery to me how he got elected in the first place.
Well, that’s not precisely true; he got elected by pandering the poor people that he would fix all their problems, and then proceeded to try to tax the middle class to pay for his programs.
I was there for two years of his mayorship (`96-`97). Part of his “tax the middle class to pay for it” included vigorous annexation. The people in Aboite township, southwest of Ft. Wayne, unsuccessfully tried to form a town just to prevent him from annexing them. Evidently from what I read at its Wikipedia entry, that would have made Ft. Wayne/Allen county a Unigov, and given Herr Helmke de facto control of the entire county, if he had succeeded in annexing them back in `96 when he started it. I’m glad to see Aboite held them off for almost 10 years.