Bob Stone has written a great post, What's with all the guns??, regarding ethics and those who are carrying semi-automatic guns at presidential events. On Bob's blog I asked a simple question that I would like to also ask here: If there was a group of law-abiding black men from Detroit in a suburban city who carried visible semi-automatic weapons in a public square because they had the right to do so when President Bush was in office, how would this have been viewed by law enforcement and by those in the crowd?
Might these black men have been arrested on the spot? Might they have dispersed the crowd automatically? (No pun intended.) The visibility of these semi-automatic weapons and all others is just so incredibly frightening no matter who's carrying them or who's in office. We're not even allowed to shout fire in a crowded theater, right? Perhaps we need some kind of law that would prohibit such guns within a certain proximity of presidential events.
By the way, Bob Stone and Mick Ukleja have a newly released book that I have begun reading that is great, The Ethics Challege: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World. Perhaps I'll write more here on this book later.