Establishment Republican politicians love to talk big about just how much they revere the Second Amendment but like the very concept of democracy they are a pack of hypocrites as it applies to this summer’s brokered convention. It has been mandated that Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena is a gun free zone but that isn’t sitting well with some including a pro-liberty activist group that has launched a petition drive to allow for open carry among convention goers.

The Guardian reports that “Petition to allow guns at Republican convention earns 24,000 signatures”:

An online petition to allow guns into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July has received more than 24,000 signatures in favor of overturning the “irresponsible and hypocritical act of selecting a ‘gun-free zone’” for the party’s quadrennial gathering.

The convention will be held between 18 and 21 July at the Quicken Loans Arena, a venue with a policy that forbids “firearms and other weapons of any kind” on its grounds. Republican debate venues have also barred firearms.

The petition, posted anonymously to Change.org last week, declares the Cleveland arena’s weapons ban “a direct affront to the second amendment and puts all attendees at risk”.

“By forcing attendees to leave their firearms at home,” the petition continues, “the RNC and Quicken Loans Arena are putting tens of thousands of people at risk both inside and outside of the convention site”.

The petition makes several other demands. It asks for Ohio governor John Kasich – one of the party’s three remaining presidential candidates – to use executive action to override arena owners’ right to set rules over their private property, and for the Republican party chair to explain “how a venue so unfriendly to second amendment rights was chosen for the Republican convention”.

“Every American is endowed with a God-given constitutional right to carry a gun wherever and whenever they please,” the author writes.

Despite the petition the chance of this actually happening is much like Lindsey Graham’s poll numbers – right around zero. The party bosses and their special interest paymasters are already going to be facing the possibility of open revolt once their own front-runner is screwed out of the nomination by the bigwigs. The last thing that Reince Priebus and his ilk would want would be the prospect of thousands of outraged Trump supporters who are packing heat. The way that the game is going to work is that the only guns in the arena will belong to those who will be tasked with enforcing the elitist fiat that someone other than Trump will be trotted out to get mashed by the Clinton machine in November. There are tens of millions of dollars now being poured into the host city of Cleveland in order to fund militarized police, anti-terrorism and crowd control measures as the establishment is preparing for something to happen.

The convention will be held ‎July 18–21, 2016.