Two men with guns were shot dead after they opened fire in Garland, Texas, this weekend, at an event sponsored by Pamela Geller [pictured], notorious anti-Muslim whackadoodle who was hosting a contest with a $10,000 prize for drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
A security guard was also wounded in the attack.
Geller has been in the news before, mostly around her blighted and dishonest 2010 campaign to keep a not-mosque from not-Ground Zero. She billed the Texas event as an exploration of “free speech,” because Pamela Geller doesn’t want to live in a world where she can’t drawn cartoons of a religious leader she doesn’t follow, anyway.
To non-Muslims: For more on why such cartoons are considered offensive to some Muslims, this Vox piece by Amanda Taub is pretty good.
To Pamela Geller: People are starving. They’re sleeping under bridges. If you must put your energies somewhere, would you consider putting them somewhere other than inciting the kind of volatile people the FBI is already monitoring, anyway?
For more on Geller’s dangerous ignorance, to here. Or, better yet? Go outside and smell a flower.
Dating Jesus 
Another triumph of Free Speech.
The right to free speech means nothing without the right to offend. No religion gets a free pass from honest criticism or outright mockery. None. Not one.
And speaking of rights, it seems terrorists don’t fare as well against armed security in Texas (*cough* as they do against unarmed police in France.
Define “honest criticism.”
The right to free speech means nothing without the right to offend.
Then the “right to free speech” means nothing, because there’s no such thing as the right to offend. Some speech is protected. Some is not. It depends on the intent, the mode, and the result.
The police in France are not unarmed, as they are in Great Britain. France has one of the most heavily armed, militarized law enforcement systems in Europe.
The meme about “unarmed French police” was promulgated by NRA Groupies after reports of first responders on the scene of the Hebdo tragedy tactically retreating, initially, in the face of superior firepower. You should really check your sources more carefully.
(*cough* 2nd Amendment *cough*)
Bless your heart.
Those shooters in Texas were killed by police…a traffic cop. Not by private security. Not by a civilian. Which essentially removes the 2nd Amendment from the conversation. Unless you want to discuss how a libertarian approach to the 2nd Amendment might have played a role in arming those shooters.