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Like a lot of "2nd Amendment!" questions, this seems to misunderstand what the amendment means.A private entity (like a professional sports franchise, or the Republican National Committee) wouldn't be restricting any Second Amendment rights by having a no guns policy at an event, because that amendment doesn't apply to them. The Second Amendment applies to state action, which isn't generally something the Detroit Lions, for example, can undertake. Similarly, if I tell a house-guest to leave his rifle in his trunk rather than bringing it into my house, I'm not restricting his constitutional rights. I simply lack the ability to take a "state action" all by my lonesome, and the exchange is between private actors on private property.And even with an extremely generous reading of the Second Amendment it's hard to take a "no restrictions whatsoever on guns, anywhere" interpretation, even for the federal government. There are certain situations where the public good or security concerns clearly outweigh individual gun rights: going into a federal courthouse, visiting someone in a prison, taking a tour of the White House, etc. Large, important events like the Republican National Convention would seem to fall into this.

I would concur with Ahmad Shah Massoud. He was more feared by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda than they feared the US. This was because they readily took on the US with the 911 attack knowing that the attack would be traced back to them but so feared Massoud's ability to defeat them, backed by the angry US, that they had him assassinated by suicide bombers BEFORE 911.Two Al-Qaeda followers posing as news reporters with a bomb in the camera blew him up two days before 911. They knew that he had the means, ability and respect of his countrymen to destroy them with US backing. No one else in Afghanistan had that level of respect.His reputation as a Mujahdeen commander was one of lore. He fought alongside his men and was effective in causing the Soviets to depart Afghanistan, thus his title, 'The Lion'. After the departure of the Soviets and the Communist government, his troops defended the capital against all of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in his efforts to replace the Communist government with a moderate one.Here is a passage from Wikipedia:Ahmad Shah Massoud (Dari Persian: احمد شاه مسعود;[1] September 2, 1953 – September 9, 2001) was an Afghan political and military leader, who was a powerful military commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989 and in the following years of civil war. He was assassinated on September 9, 2001.Massoud came from an ethnic Tajik, Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with fundamentalist Muslim anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist. He was part of a Pakistan-backed failed rebellion against Mohammed Daoud Khan's government. After the Soviet occupation of 1979, his role as an insurgent leader earned him the nickname of "Lion of Panjshir" (شیر پنجشیر) among his followers. In 1992, after he disturbed the UN plan to install an interim government to replace that of President Mohammad Najibullah, he was appointed as the minister of defense through the Peshawar Accord, a peace and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan. His militia fought to defend the capital against militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Abdul Ali Mazari, Abdul Rashid Dostum and eventually the Taliban, who started to lay siege to the capital in January 1995 after the city had seen fierce fighting; at least 60,000 civilians were killed, many more injured, public property, government offices and the Kabul Museum had been looted, and two thirds of the population had fled the city.Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud, who rejected the Taliban's fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, returned to armed opposition until he eventually fled to Kulob, Tajikistan, destroying the Salang Tunnel on his way north. He became the military and political leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (also known in the West as the Northern Alliance).He was assassinated, at the instigation of al-Qaeda, in a suicide bombing on September 9, 2001, just two days before the September 11 attacks in the United States which led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation invading Afghanistan, allying with Massoud's forces.​​He was considered one of the most feared Mujahdeen leaders fighting the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan. He was a bona fide 'bad ass.' How many other generals would the enemy put out a hit squad to assassinate BEFORE a war was declared? How many other generals would have a nickname like 'The Lion'?Here is a link to an article written by a friend of his a couple years ago. Now you see why he was 'The Lion'.http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/09/afghanistan-shadow-ahmad-shah-mas-2014997826874331.htmlEDIT: several folks asked about his accomplishments. He was recognized as the most powerful and singular force to cause the Soviet Union to leave and the downfall of the communist government in Afghanistan. See BELOW:Following the 1979 Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Massoud devised a strategic plan for expelling the invaders and overthrowing the communist regime. The first task was to establish a popularly based resistance force that had the loyalty of the people. The second phase was "active defense" of the Panjshir stronghold, while carrying out asymmetric warfare. In the third phase, the "strategic offensive", Massoud's forces would gain control of large parts of Northern Afghanistan. The fourth phase was the "general application" of Massoud's principles to the whole country, and the defeat of the Afghan communist government.From the start of the war, Massoud's mujahideen attacked the occupying Soviet forces, ambushing Soviet and Afghan communist convoys travelling through the Salang Pass, and causing fuel shortages in Kabul. The Soviets mounted a series of offensives against the Panjshir. Between 1980 and 1985, these offensives were conducted twice a year. Despite engaging more men and hardware on each occasion, the Soviets were unable to defeat Massoud's forces. In 1982, the Soviets began deploying major combat units in the Panjshir, numbering up to 30,000 men. Massoud pulled his troops back into subsidiary valleys, where they occupied fortified positions. When the Soviet columns advanced onto these positions, they fell into ambushes. When the Soviets withdrew, Afghan army garrisons took over their positions. Massoud and his mujahideen forces attacked and recaptured them one by one.In 1983, the Soviets offered Massoud a temporary truce, which he accepted in order to rebuild his own forces and give the civilian population a break from Soviet attacks. He put the respite to good use. In this time he created the Shura-e Nazar (Supervisory Council), which subsequently united 130 commanders from 12 Afghan provinces in their fight against the Soviet army. This council existed outside the Peshawar parties, which were prone to internecine rivalry and bickering, and served to smooth out differences between resistance groups, due to political and ethnic divisions. It was the predecessor of what could have become a unified Islamic Afghan army.Relations with the party headquarters in Peshawar were often strained, as Rabbani insisted on giving Massoud no more weapons and supplies than to other Jamiat commanders, even those who did little fighting. To compensate for this deficiency, Massoud relied on revenues drawn from exports of emeralds and lapis lazuli, that are traditionally exploited in Northern Afghanistan.To organize support for the mujahideen, Massoud established an administrative system that enforced law and order (nazm) in areas under his control. The Panjshir was divided into 22 bases (qarargah) governed by a military commander and a civilian administrator, and each had a judge, a prosecutor and a public defender. 'Massoud's Massoud' were implemented by different committees: an economic committee was charged with funding the war effort. The health committee provided health services, assisted by volunteers from foreign humanitarian non-governmental organizations, such as Aide médicale internationale. An education committee was charged with the training of the military and administrative cadre. A culture committee and a judiciary committee were also created.This expansion prompted Babrak Karmal to demand that the Red Army resume their offensives, in order to crush the Panjshir groups. However, Massoud had received warning of the attack through his intelligence agents in the government and he evacuated all 130,000 inhabitants from the valley into the Hindukush mountains, leaving the Soviet bombings to fall on empty ground and the Soviet battalions to face the mountains.With the defeat of the Soviet-Afghan attacks, Massoud carried out the next phase of his strategic plan, expanding the resistance movement and liberating the northern provinces of Afghanistan. In August 1986, he captured Farkhar in Takhar Province. In November 1986, his forces overran the headquarters of the government's 20th division at Nahrin in Baghlan Province, scoring an important victory for the resistance. This expansion was also carried out through diplomatic means, as more mujahideen commanders were persuaded to adopt the Panjshir military system.Despite almost constant attacks by the Red Army and the Afghan army, Massoud increased his military strength. Starting in 1980 with a force of less than 1,000 ill-equipped guerrillas, the Panjshir valley mujahideen grew to a 5,000-strong force by 1984. After expanding his influence outside the valley, Massoud increased his resistance forces to 13,000 fighters by 1989. These forces were divided into different types of units: the locals (mahalli) were tasked with static defense of villages and fortified positions. The best of the mahalli were formed into units called grup-i zarbati (shock troops), semi-mobile groups that acted as reserve forces for the defense of several strongholds. A different type of unit was the mobile group (grup-i-mutaharek), a lightly equipped commando-like formation numbering 33 men, whose mission was to carry out hit-and-run attacks outside the Panjshir, sometimes as far as 100 km from their base. These men were professional soldiers, well-paid and trained, and, from 1983 on, they provided an effective strike force against government outposts. Uniquely among the mujahideen, these groups wore uniforms, and their use of the pakul made this headwear emblematic of the Afghan resistance.Massoud's military organization was an effective compromise between the traditional Afghan method of warfare and the modern principles of guerrilla warfare which he had learned from the works of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.His forces were considered the most effective of all the various Afghan resistance movements.The United States provided Massoud with comparatively less support than other factions.[35] Part of the reason was that it permitted its funding and arms distribution to be administered by Pakistan, which favored the rival mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In an interview, Massoud said, "We thought the CIA knew everything. But they didn't. They supported some bad people [meaning Hekmatyar]."[citation needed] Primary advocates for supporting Massoud were the US State Department's Edmund McWilliams and Peter Tomsen, who were on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Others included two Heritage Foundation foreign policy analysts, Michael Johns and James A. Phillips, both of whom championed Massoud as the Afghan resistance leader most worthy of U.S. support under the Reagan Doctrine. Thousands of foreign Islamic volunteers entered Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet troops.The Soviet army and the Afghan communist army were mainly defeated by Massoud and his mujahideen in numerous small engagements between 1984 and 1988. In 1989, after describing the Soviet Union's military engagement in Afghanistan "a bleeding wound", Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began a withdrawal of Soviet troops from the nation. On February 15, 1989, in what was depicted as an improbable victory for the mujahideen, the last Soviet soldier left the nation.Ahmad Shah Massoud

I’m not a registered Democrat or a believer in a fair amount of their party platform, but I’m a Never-Trumper and the Republican Party had already started shoving me out the door and sending me packing years before that with their policies towards education, so I think I can still be qualified to answer this question.There are a number of Republicans I respect a lot, on Quora and in real life.When I was in law school, I worked a summer as judicial intern for several judges, all of whom were Republicans, and some of whom were appointed by Republican governors and some by Democratic governors. All of them were upstanding members of their communities, involved in service organizations such as the Lions and Kiwanis, and were thoughtful, kind, and generous individuals. They were excellent, fair, and nonpartisan judges and their political affiliation never once was the sole or even partial basis for their judgments. They followed the law and applied it as best they could. They have a tremendous amount of integrity and honesty.When I was teaching, I developed a relationship with the local state assemblyman, who was Republican and the chair of the assembly’s Education Committee. He was always willing to take a call and listen to me as an educational professional. We sometimes disagreed, but he was always articulate about why and never disrespectful or simply reciting a talking point. He would always thank me for my perspective and carefully considered it. If he didn’t change his mind, he at least explained to me why and in fair and respectful terms. He has since been forced to retire by the party under threat of primary, and it saddens and frustrates me. The party evicted him because of his support for the Common Core State Standards, and I can’t help but feel partially responsible, as he quashed a bill that would withdraw Wisconsin from them after a long conversation I had with him. But he bucked the party in other ways that I admired, including refusing to vote for the 2013 state budget because it contained a number of provisions that were added at the last minute by party leadership that he couldn’t know the full impact of, and because of that, couldn’t explain to constituents. I admire his integrity and honesty.I respect these Republicans because whether we agreed on policy, at the end of the day, they always exemplified honesty, integrity, thoughtfulness, and compassion. They wrestled with decisions. They never punted or relied upon talking points. They never acted solely as ideologues, but always considered the scope of any proposal. They always acted under the belief that the offices they hold are a public trust, and that they are civil servants. They never lusted for power or prestige, or to line their own pockets.These Republicans don’t cling to conspiracy theories or propaganda. They trust in the merits of what they believe. They trust in the intelligence of their constituents; rather than pander to the lowest common denominator with wedge issues and baiting, they would speak to the best in people and try to unify them around their ideas.When they were in the minority, they were the loyal, honorable opposition. They would advocate for their principles, but at the end of the day, they would still have a beer with their friends across the aisle and they didn’t denigrate their opponents or treat them with contempt. And when they were in power, they listened to the opposition of the other side and sought to come to consensus. At a minimum, they at least sought to make the opposition feel heard.As Andrew Weill noted about Republicans he respects, we may not always have agreed on matters of policy, but never once did I have cause to question their character.Sad to say, but these kinds of Republicans are a disappearing cohort, and very few of the people replacing them are of the same mold.