Written by Taylor Berman for gawker.com
From their “What Would Django Do?” campaign to their ill-fated (and shooting-filled) Gun Appreciation Day to idiotic NRA commercials, pro-gun activists have been on an impressive roll. But it’s been a few days since their last PR disaster – surely they’ve done something stupid recently, right? Correct. During a legislative hearing Monday in at the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford, protesters heckled the father of a six-year-old killed at Sandy Hook elementary.
When Neil Heslin, who was holding a picture of his deceased son, Jesse Lewis, during his testimony, asked the state senate why Bushmaster-type assault rifles should be legal, several gun enthusiasts in the audience reportedly shouted him down, yelling “The Second Amendment!”
So just to repeat: the father of a six-year-old boy who died six weeks ago asked a question about the weapon that killed his son, and the the gun activists attending the testimony decided to heckle him.
Heslin was unfazed by the incident. “There are a lot of things that should be changed to prevent what happened,” he said.
“That wasn’t just a killing, it was a massacre,” said Heslin, who recalled dropping off his son at Sandy Hook Elementary School shortly before Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults. “I just hope some good can come out of this.”
I would say they have a perfect right to say that, however heckling is essentially disturbing a public event. We could not function as a society if he, or she, with the loudest bullhorn, or the loudest voice, were allowed to disrupt anything. There are limits to every right: including guns. We as a society need to agree, somewhat, as to those limits.