In yet another attack on the Second Amendment, the president is taking away the right to keep and bear arms in the State Dining Room. Last month, reports USA Today, new signs appeared outside the White House guard shacks by the metal detectors reading “WARNING: WEAPONS PROHIBITED.”
The signs are new, but the law making it a Class A misdemeanor to bring a firearm or any sort of weapon into a government building has been on the books since 1988. If a person has a gun and intends to commit a crime, the charge becomes a felony. However, the law stipulates that penalties have to “be posted conspicuously at each public entrance to each federal facility.” Without the signs, a gun-toting tourist cannot be prosecuted. “The signs were put up literally because we have to by law,” David Iacovetti, the Secret Service’s deputy assistant director of public affairs, told USA Today. “The only way we can search somebody and have those charges stick is have the sign posted.” Since 1995, when the law became enforceable, the only person charged with bringing guns into a federal building in D.C. has been James Wenneker von Brunn, the man who shot a guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2009.
Needless to say, this outrage against our constitutional rights cannot stand, at least on Twitter:
Because the only thing that can stop a bad White House tourist with a gun is a good White House tourist with a gun. Or the Secret Service, or an FBI agent, or the D.C. police.
