Hey Joe: Police Harrassment

While listening to Jimi Hendrix's Hey Joe and conducting what I believed to be a private diatribe, or protest, or, if you're Yogi Berra, a private diatribe to myself, a police officer approached me and asked why I had mentioned the sniper.

Now, he was obviously referring to the Palestinian, Fort Hood, sniper, while I was referring to the DC sniper. Hence, I told him that I had not, at least not in the context of the report had allegedly been made to him, one that undoubtedly implicated me. Because he could hear me from his car, I was not sure anyone had actually, as he claimed, made a report, or whether he simply either disagreed with, or misunderstood the nature of my protest. I then, attempting to explain that i was actually protesting the glamorization of Hey Joe, which involves a scenario in which Joe gets a gun, from a home, and goes down to shoot his " old lady," allegedly, according to Officer X, conceded that I had referred to " the sniper." Again, he failed to specify which sniper.

The DC sniper, to whom I was specifically referring, because I don't know that Jope was Palestinian, and maybe the Palestinian sniper, as well, implicitly, were the basis of what I believed to be a private rant, which even if it were not, private, I would believe to be nonetheless legitimate, and within my First Amendment rights - to protest what I think to be a horrendous Supreme Court ruling on the 2nd Amendment for the first time in the history of the country, to overturn not only the 1976 DC gun law - explicitly - but also the Brady Bill - so that DC residents could possess guns in their homes. What about Columbine ? Those guns were not taken from-homes-to-schools ? Does anyone remember the scene from the Deerhunter, with Robert DeNiro ?

I raised funds for the renewal of the Brady Bill, in fact, while with a private firm called the Share Group, so the issue is close to my heart. Guns are serious. DeNiro's character was someone who'd returned from Vietnam, only to discover himself impotent with respect to his ability to use a gun, even to shoot a deer. He would later discover his friends playing with a gun, which sent him into a fit of rage. That rage is how serious I believe we should be about not only guns, weapons in general, but about the issue, about the Constitution, and our First Amendment rights, and the same Supreme Court that effectively elected George W. Bush, stopping a recount and nullifying the votes of not only the majority of Americans who voted for Al Gore, but every American who voted.