Sam Coleman Owes Some of Us an Apology

Holy cow! I came across this story while doing the Morning Roundup over at Pith, about how Councilmember Sam Coleman wants Nashville to allow guns in our more rural parks because they might be dangerous.

And I really can’t decide which is worse–that at a time when the Parks budget is being gone over with a fine-tooth comb and when people’s jobs are on the chopping block, some Councilmember is going around naming which parks he thinks are so unsafe that you need a gun to go to them? If the Bell’s Bend Park gets closed in order to save money because it’s so “rural” and “isolated” and “dangerous,” because of Coleman’s slander, I’m going to be pissed.

Or the insinuation that the rural people in Davidson County are such a bunch of evil rednecks that we hide in our parks and just wait for naive, unarmed city folks to come into our parks and then it’s just all Deliverance all the time. I mean, who else does he think are going to sit around rural, isolated parks just hoping that someone might come by?

It’s just so fucking insulting, to insinuate that people need to arm themselves against us, because we’re so damn dangerous.

And I also don’t want to open up a  whole other can of worms, but it’s not like they frisk you at the entrance to the parks. The point of having our rural parks gun-free is not so that they are actually gun-free, but so that people who aren’t used to rural noises, including animals that get very close to you in the brush or the sound of gun-fire echoing off the hills more close to you than you might expect, don’t feel like their first reaction should be to reach for their guns and start shooting.

Yes, that’s right, you urban Barney Fifes. We are just as afraid of you as you are of us.