Machine guns have a chilling effect on freedom of speech:

[originalpckelly]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cocktail_hour/2799187964/

So there I was, an awful sunburn. I was peeling, and oozing. I was sitting on the grass, next to some ladies perhaps in their sixties. They were very nice.
We were eating Helados ice cream from one of those little rolling carts. Right across from this obviously threatening scene were about 30 police officers carrying machine guns. I was proud to live in America, and I was so glad that we would never engage in national behavior that has a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

I will never forget, one August week in Denver, and my changed impression of "representative democracy" in America.

[BlooInBloo]

1. Yup. State-supported domestic terrorists can all fucking go to hell.

[originalpckelly]

2. I mean, it's not like I should be intimidated by machine guns...

that could have cut me in two while sitting there, if something had gone wrong.

That was the DNC by the way.

[BlooInBloo]

3. Yup.

[originalpckelly]

4. How much do you bet me this is the last post?

Cognitive dissonance is not exactly popular.

[BlooInBloo]

6. Zero. But it's a bit after the fact. :)

[originalpckelly]

10. Obama is returning to Denver to sign the stimulus...

to an invitation only ceremony at the museum of nature and science. I wonder how much security there will be.

*edited to fix ticket with invitation, that's the way it's going down. I wonder who's getting the invitations? Probably political insiders and token normal people.

[chrisa]

5. Police behavior at the DNC and RNC were shameful.

What a waste of time this entire 8 years has been.

[Mish]

8. Yes!

And what a utopia these next four will be. Oh praise God!

[Wickerman]

12. Isn't it grand so far?

Allah is truly good.

[jobycom]

7. Lots of things do.

Too many cops, not enough cops, molotov cocktails hurled at participants of political conventions... The key isn't the number of machine guns, it is at what and at whom the machine guns are leveled. Which is why the guns don't scare me as much as the mentality of whomever is in power.

[bertman]

9. But don't you remember? They were there to protect you from the terrists and anarchists.

[originalpckelly]

11. I felt real safe.

And you know what? It wasn't even against Obama, I was there to support him! And yet, we still got the machine gun treatment.

[David Dunham]

13. Security was increased because Obama had received death threats during the convention.

[originalpckelly]

14. I'm quite aware of that, but I was no where near the actual convention.

I was in Civic Center park, which is at least a mile or two away from the Pepsi Center where the convention was actually held.

[bertman]

15. You're right, David. However, increasing security does not necessarily mean you have

swat-style teams armed with automatic assault weapons lining the streets. Uniformed police officers interspersed in the crowds, along with plain-clothes police mingling would also be an effective way to show a police presence.

The tactics we saw in Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul were textbook fascist police state tactics designed to intimidate people who were legally assembling to express themselves and their political agendas. The fact that they also rounded up many innocent citizens who had done nothing illegal is further proof of this.

[aikoaiko]

16. What makes you think they were machine guns?

:shrug:

[Wiley50]

17. Yep. Machine Guns create terrible punctuation on speech. No colons, commas, ect

just a hail of deadly periods