The thought of 60 white people carrying guns was enough to keep my black ass out of Northside last Sunday (see Show of Force).
Sure, they say they were protesting the Ohio Supreme Court's decision to uphold Ohio's ban on carrying concealed weapons, but why not transport that posse to lawmakers' doorsteps in Columbus?
Why not? Because the broad daylight gun-toting faction of Cincinnati doesn't carry guns for protection. They carry guns for perpetuation.
They're trying to bully the rest of us into believing that a menace is intent on charging into our homes, pillaging our belongings and shooting us down in front of our families.
They aren't arming themselves against any slippery threat. They're publicly arming themselves to perpetuate their myth of the Wild West, where the law went like this: Shoot first and arrange justice to fit your guilt.
The choice to carry a weapon -- concealed or not -- is personal, just like worship, sex and abortion. Yet zealots ram down our throats their displeasure with people trying to peacefully coexist in a city and a neighborhood that could well do without any more stirring along extremist lines.
We've spent an inordinate amount of time examining and then blaming Over-the-Rhine for what ails and what could possibly save Cincinnati. It's visionless tunnel vision.
With its potential for economic stability, housing and racially and financially mixed cultures, art, taverns and history, Over-the-Rhine does stand as a neglected jewel. But so do countless other Cincinnati neighborhoods, Northside among them.
It's got the urban Appalachia of Price Hill, the condensed eclectic funkiness of San Francisco and a little West End boom boom thrown in for color. There are independent businesses whose owners remain despite the supermarket of brazen prostitution and drug dealing. These Northsiders live and work there, unlike most downtown businesses, whose owners don't live where they expect us to spend our money.
White gun owners "parading" for no other reason than to show the general public how pissed off they are about a law upheld two hours away is as divisive, irresponsible and racist as the white customers perpetually flitting in and out of Northside from other communities to cop crack.
Fed-up Northside business owners have repeatedly told me they've called on Cincinnati cops to stem the drug- and sex-dealing tide there. The cops rarely, if ever, show up.
And evidently 60 gun-strapped white people weren't enough to immediately rouse cops across the viaduct to Northside either.
I bet my blackness that if 60 black, predominantly male "protesters" visibly carrying guns cut a swath down any Cincinnati neighborhood the streets would transform to a SWAT training video. I can see it now: cops on horseback, plain-clothed detectives moving through the gathered crowd, Simon Leis' ghetto bird hovering overhead and rubber bullets at the ready.
Instead, Cincinnati cops followed along as Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich and Harold "Hal" McKinney, my long-ago Friday night date, showed their support for carrying concealed weapons.
Politicians behave irresponsibly under the guise of political protection. But McKinney, the source of racial debate when he got away with shooting a black man in a Northside bar, continues to baffle me.
I've seen up close the way he oscillates between concerned Joe Citizen and seething gun freak. He told CityBeat News Editor Gregory Flannery he fell in with the concealed carry advocates because they needed "responsible adults."
"Quality of life issues have to come before flowers," McKinney said.
Northside, he said, is not a safe and thriving place to live. Pissed-off gun owners and drug dealers will see to that.
Hear Kathy's commentaries on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
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