Doing it right, Pennsylvania Gun Show bans assault weapons.

Courtesy of TPM:  

With the debate over gun control raging in Washington, the organizers of a major gun show in Harrisburg, Penn., have banned assault weapons at their February event, Lancaster Online reports. 

The organizer of the annual Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show in Harrisburg apparently is banning so-called assault weapons from this year's show. 

Reed Exhibitions has informed some exhibitors -- including Kinsey's Outdoors in Mount Joy and The Sportsman's Shop in New Holland, representatives of both stores said -- that AR-style rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines capable of holding 30 rounds or more may not be sold or displayed at the show, scheduled for Feb. 2-10 at the State Farm Show Complex on Cameron Street.

Nice to see that SOME people are getting the message and making changes.

However as you would expect not everybody is so quick to recognize the writing on the wall.

This from Think Progress:

A small Wisconsin town school board will vote Monday night on whether or not to grant the Indianhead Rifle and Pistol Club access to the local elementary school this April for its annual gun show. 

Spooner Elementary School has hosted the show without much objection for the last two decades. But less than a month after the mass shooting at Newtown elementary school that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and 7 others, some community members are raising objections to the idea of welcoming hundreds of guns and gun owners into a public elementary school. 

Tim Brabec, a member of the club and organizer of their annual gun show, told ThinkProgress that the decision to use the elementary school is one of convenience. 

“Who doesn’t have sympathy with the families in [Connecticut]?” said Brabec when asked about whether the visual of a gun show at an elementary school was appropriate so soon after the deadly shooting in Newtown. “But we don’t associate one with the other. We don’t go there for the shock value.” 

Shock was but one reaction to the news that the town was considering granting the show permission to use the school. “I do not agree with it at all,” said one commenter online. “I was shocked to hear about it last year, and can’t believe they would even consider it this year after the shooting in CT.”

Personally I find this almost impossible to digest, considering the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, and that the type of weapons used there may be on sale in this place that used to be the very definition of a safe place for children.

In other news today the parents of Newtown, Connecticut announced the organization of violence prevention effort:    

Nelba Marquez-Greene put her two children on the school bus on the morning of Dec. 14. Only one came home. Nicole Hockley still finds herself reaching for her son’s hand in parking lots, or expects “him to crawl into my bed for early-morning cuddles before school.” 

“It’s so hard to believe he’s gone,” she said. 

The grieving mothers and other parents and relatives of victims killed in the Dec. 14 elementary school massacre gathered here at a news conference on Monday to help begin a campaign intended to prevent the kind of bloodshed that has turned this quiet New England community into a national symbol of grief. 

In some of their first public statements since the shooting, which killed 20 children and 6 staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the families of 11 of the victims called for a national dialogue on issues of mental health, school safety and what their nonprofit group, called Sandy Hook Promise, described as “gun responsibility.”

You know perhaps the people thinking of holding that gun show in Wisconsin would like to see the autopsy pictures of these poor innocent victims in Connecticut.

Perhaps THAT would provide some context for them so that they could come to understand that these weapons are not simply for show, or target practicing, or making a pansy ass feel like a real man. They are for killing, in a way that tears human bodies into chunks of meat and rips loved one out of the arms of their families forever.

Just a thought.