If you’re planning to protest at the Republican National Convention in Tampa from 8/27 to 8/30, please take extreme care to avoid conflict with the local minions of InsaniTEA there. It will not be a safe place to be, because, for the Republican Party, extreme ideology trumps public safety.

Mayor Bob Buckhorn of Tampa, Fla., proudly packs a .38-caliber revolver as one of the 900,000 Floridians holding concealed-weapon permits these days. But even Mayor Buckhorn thinks it is a bad idea to allow the people who will be thronging outside the Republican National Convention in the city this August to carry concealed weapons.

He asked Gov. Rick Scott this week to issue an executive order banning guns in all of downtown Tampa, not just in the convention hall and the immediately surrounding zone controlled by the Secret Service. “In the potentially contentious environment surrounding the R.N.C., a firearm unnecessarily increases the threat of imminent harm and injury to the residents and visitors of the city,” he wrote to the governor. The request was rejected by Governor Scott, a Republican, who contended that the temporary ban would “surely violate” the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In fact, said the governor, “it is at just such times” that self-defense is “most precious.”

A distorted notion of self-defense, of course, underpins Florida’s notorious Stand Your Ground law at issue in the shooting death of an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman… [emphasis added]