I can only wish good luck to the city of Cleveland, Ohio, the unfortunate host of the upcoming Republican Party convention.
As well as hosting whatever happens to come out of GOP nominee Donald Trump's mouth on the day - something probably not even he can predict - it will also be hosting both pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrations. The city has created a limited-access "event zone" around the main convention venues (albeit a much smaller one than they originally wanted), and has drafted in some 3,000 police officers from around the state to bolster its own 1,700 officers. It will be hot, tempers will be short, and some kind if violence will almost certainly occur at some point.
With unrest still simmering after the recent police shootings, there will almost certainly also be a Black Lives Matter contingent - an organization Trump has publicly criticized (as being, among other things, racist), and almost certainly will do again at the convention. And, like it or not, where BLM goes, there too go controversy, belligerent support and outspoken opposition. To what extent BLM can actually be "blamed" for stirring up the kind of anti-police sentiments behind the Dallas and Baton Rouge reprisals is anyone's guess.
Now, add into this already explosive situation, the fact that the state of Ohio has an "open-carry" gun law, meaning that citizens can legally carry guns on the streets (yes, even within the "event zone", although not actually inside the convention arena), and we have what looks to me like a recipe for potential disaster. Now, of course, citizens are not allowed to draw or point those guns, which I have always thought makes a mockery of the whole law - what is the point of being able to carry a gun if it can't be used? Is it a fashion statement of some kind? But, with the summer heat, the crush of bodies, the heightened political and racial tension, how do you think this is going to go?
I think, if I lived in Cleveland (not that I ever would), I would be booking an overseas vacation right now. I hear that France or Iraq are nice at this time of year, and frankly they might be safer than Cleveland.
UPDATE
A hilarious (were it not so sad) graphic has surfaced in which Cleveland's safety priorities for the GOP convention are highlighted.
Here we see that shotguns, long guns, handguns and assault rifles (such as AK-47s) are all fine, but don't you dare try to bring in knives hammers, loud-hailers, metal drinks cans, shovels, tennis balls(!), locks, light bulbs(!), cool-boxes, or whole (as opposed to cut up) fruit.
UPDATE
In the event, there was no real violence at the convention - other than an inept protestor who accidentally set himself on fire while trying to burn the American flag, and some "minor" assaults on policemen - something the gun lobby will probably claim to their own credit.
Which is not to say that the convention was a raging success: between the failed GOP insurrection that aimed to overthrow Trump before his official nomination, and Melania Trump's plagiarized speech, and Ted Cruz's pointed refusal to endorse Trump, and Trump's own pompous, self-aggrandizing, apocalyptically negative, fact-bereft acceptance speech, and the very fact that so many GOP heavy hitters deliberately didn't attend at all, the Republican Party still finds itself in an unprecedentedly divided and parlous state.
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