Here are other things that did not happen this past weekend that we know of: The police did not see someone legally carrying a gun and mistake them for a criminal and shoot them. No innocent bystanders were shot or killed by gun-wielding private citizens. No gun-carrying individuals shot anyone. No one got mad at anyone and shot them in anger, because they had a gun handy. There were no gun fights between the fans of Glocks and those who prefer 1911’s. No guns were taken from their owners and used against them. No guns jumped off tables and attacked anyone. No high capacity magazines killed anyone. No children handling firearms were hurt or killed. And – most hard to believe – not one person fired his gun in the air in celebration of something said from the NRA stage.
81,846 NRA Members Showed Up…and Nothing Happened – Townhall
Unfortunately, Atlanta PD does not commune with CrimeMapping.com which is my To-Go resource for Before/After comparison for the NRA AM. There are other sources but they proved to be both less flexible and reliable.
Anyway and knowing that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, I have the suspicions that Atlanta’s criminal element gave a wide berth to the Georgia World Congress Center area during our little soiree.
When I attended on Friday, I took a MARTA train and walked a ~half mile from the station, through part of downtown, across the park, and to the venue. Some of the throng converging were open carrying, and every police officer I saw was greeting and smiling or nodding to the attendees along the way, as were the Georgia World Congress center workers. Well, there was one officer heatedly yelling at one person — a bus driver who was trying to enter an obviously closed-off section of street. Other than that, I saw no confrontation whatsoever the whole day there. Almost everyone was smiling, and those who weren’t were showing fatigue from the excitement and thousands of steps they’d taken by mid-day. 🙂