Gubs for the day

Manny Fernandez has an article in The New York Times about a gub rally in, of course, Texas:

Angela L. Pena brought her family to the Alamo on Saturday. She also brought her black assault rifle, a .223-caliber LWRC M4, and had it strapped across her back. Her daughter brought her M&P rifle; her son-in-law carried his .308-caliber Remington R-25; and her 8-year-old grandson, Sebastian Gonzalez, had his Ruger 10/22 rifle. “A rifle on our back is part of our everyday life, just like a cellphone is part of our everyday life,” said Pena, 48, who manages her husband’s dental practice in South Texas.
Here, in the heart of San Antonio, the seventh-largest city in the country, hundreds of gun owners like Pena and her family carried their firearms in the open outside the entrance to the Alamo as part of a gun rights rally that was peaceful but loud.
For tourists, it was a startling sight: men, women and children openly carrying loaded and unloaded shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s as if they were purses or backpacks. A young man in jeans ate a breakfast sandwich with his assault rifle resting behind his back. A rally speaker with his own assault rifle confronted and quizzed police officials about their views of the Second Amendment, and the officials calmly looked on.
Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, teenagers and retirees , all had their guns out, as visitors to San Antonio came and went from the Alamo. Police officers monitored and filmed the rally from a building across the street.
Demonstrators were exercising a little-known privilege of Texas gun culture; Texas law allows people to walk down the street with an assault rifle, shotgun, or other type of long gun, though a state-issued license is required to carry a concealed handgun.
Gun advocates in Texas have started using their right to carry rifles publicly as part of a push to expand handgun laws. They want Texas to join several states that have allowed people licensed to carry concealed firearms to wear their weapons on their hips, unconcealed, if they wish.
Rally organizers and participants said they wanted to remind San Antonio that the carrying of rifles was not only legal but normal, and that the carrying of unconcealed weapons in public was no cause for alarm. But, at the request of organizers, most at the rally stuck plastic straws or strips into the chambers of their rifles to show that, though there might be bullets in the clip, there were none in the chamber.
Pena and her family, including Sebastian, had straws sticking out of their weapons.
Scott Gibbons had a pen in the chamber of his AR-15 rifle, which was strapped across his back as he stood next to his wife, Mandy. “Our children have been shooting guns since they were eight and nine, and they’re now twenty-eight and twenty-nine,” Gibbons said. “We want our grandchildren to also have that right.”
A group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America held an opposing rally nearby, and a San Antonio man walked through the crowd with a sign reading “The rule of the gun will kill everyone”, angering many gun owners. There was a tense though civil tone throughout.
“Look at here, we’ve got a stroller going by here, with kids running around,” said Jerry Patterson, the state’s land commissioner. Patterson, whose office oversees the Alamo, was one of several speakers at the rally. “The 190 folks that died here were defending their right to bear arms,” he said. “It’s specifically mentioned in the Texas Declaration of Independence of 2 March 1836.”
San Antonio’s police chief, William McManus, said his goal was to allow rally participants to exercise their constitutional rights, though his officers were on the lookout for violations. A local ordinance prohibits anyone other than a law enforcement official from carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun on any public street in the city. And a state law prohibits carrying a firearm in a public place in a manner calculated to cause alarm.
Chief McManus said he was not suspending the enforcement of any ordinances, and rifle owners at the rally walked a fine legal line as a result. It was unclear, for instance, whether some who carried rifles with a loaded magazine but an empty chamber were violating the local ordinance. Gun owners said the ordinance was unlawful regardless, because of a state law that prohibits municipalities from regulating firearms.
Near the end of the rally, Chief McManus said there had been no arrests. “Everything’s been running pretty smoothly,” he said. “I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive.”

Rico says WHAT