I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
This past weekend's Open Carry Picnic in Traverse City. (Photo by Eartha Jane Melzer/Michigan Messenger)
TRAVERSE CITY — Around 50 people, many of them men openly carrying loaded handguns, gathered in a local park over the weekend for a cookout billed as educational outreach on gun owners’ rights.
Participants in the “Open Carry Picnic” ate hot dogs and chips while wearing holstered hand guns at Sunset Park off the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay. As children played on the merry-go-round and tourists cruised the lakefront, the gathering was quiet but showed some signs of tension. One group of men sat around a flag hung upside-down and at half mast.
The day after Barack Obama was elected president in November, a local gun store, Hampel’s, flew an American flag upside down. Employee Rod Nyland, told a reporter for the Traverse City Record-Eagle “… we feel our country is in distress because the n—– got in.”
Nyland later apologized and was fired for his comment, but anger and fear by white conservatives have contributed to a sharp uptick in sales of weapons and ammo and applications for concealed carry permits.
According to the Michigan State Police, more than 243,000 applications for concealed weapons permits were received by county clerks across Michigan during the first five months of the year.
Brian Jeffs, president of Michigan Open Carry Inc., a non-profit organization designed to educate the public and law enforcement on the lawfulness of openly carrying firearms, said that anyone with a concealed weapon carry permit may also openly carry their weapon, though not in a bank, church, court, theater, sports arena, day-care center, hospital or places that sell liquor.
Public fear of guns is irrational, he said.
“People who don’t like guns are like sheep,” he said, “and people who carry guns are like sheep dogs.”
Skip Coryell, author of “Blood in the Streets: Concealed Carry and the OK Corral: Overcoming the Lies” attended the Traverse City event as an organizer for the Second Amendment March on the nation’s capital. In a presentation to the picnickers Coryell described the planned 2010 event as a “Million Man with Gun March.” He handed out fliers describing the march as aiming “to galvanize the courage and resolve of American gun owners.”
Coryell, a longtime gun owner, said he was “kind of disappointed” when no one seemed to notice that he had begun openly carrying his pistol while grocery shopping.
“I don’t want people to be afraid of me,” he said. “I want to show off my gun.”
“I think the message they are sending is wrong for a lot of people who don’t have a mind of their own,“ said Leo Gabier, a Korean War veteran and Traverse City resident who came out to protest the event carrying a sign “Ban Automatic Weapons.”
“Those weapons can give us a sense of power and that’s bad.”
Gabier said that a local talk radio station, the Norm Jones Show on 103.5 FM. had promoted the gun event. “These people are hateful and they want to divide the country,” Gabier said. “They shouldn’t be picnicking in a public park with loaded weapons.”
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