You shouldn’t play with guns, unless you do it the way “Jim” apparently did.

His gun play — a (seemingly) satirical petition at change.org — has enveloped the looming Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer in awkward surrealism and forced the three Republican presidential candidates to duck for cover from their own words.

The petition, posted by Hyperationalist, who later identified himself to certain curious reporters as a proponent of gun sanity named Jim, demanded that the Quicken Loans Arena, where the convention will be held, lift its ban on guns in the building and that the Republican National Committee explain “how a venue so unfriendly to Second Amendment rights” was chosen for the convention.

The first time I can remember talking to Correy Parks was directly after a #BlackLivesMatter march took over High Street from Goodale Park in route to the Columbus Police Headquarters. The intent of the protest was to deliver a letter demanding a Civilian Review Board to monitor Law Enforcement misconduct.

This was in Late November of 2014. It made the news as people taking over a major road and then crowding the circumference of the Police Headquarters would.

Here we are in Spring of 2016. I've always been curious what happened from that.

I met up with Correy for this article last week to talk about his newest album, “The Road Less    Traveled.” which takes it's name from a Vermont Poet Laurette Robert Frost writing about perseverance.

What would turn a happy, fun-loving dad into an eternal grouch? As far as filmmaker Jen Sanko is concerned, the culprit is Rush Limbaugh.

Sanko makes her case against Limbaugh and other purveyors of right-wing rage in The Brainwashing of My Dad, one of 16 films featured in the Gateway Film Center’s upcoming Documentary Week. (See schedule below.)

As demonstrated by the family’s home movies, Sanko’s father, Frank, was a joy to be around when she was growing up. In his later years, however, he discovered Limbaugh and became a perpetually pissed-off “dittohead.”

Frank even moved out of his wife’s bedroom so he could listen to the commentator’s rants well into the night. Eventually, he added Fox News and various websites to his daily diet of conservative vitriol.

This year’s presidential primaries have highlighted the importance of people of color to the Democratic Party coalition. Hillary Clinton’s lead in the party’s nomination race comes almost entirely from her strength among African-Americans and Latino voters. When people of color favor one candidate by large margins, they make the difference.

That will be true in the general election as well. Democratic nominees win if people of color vote in large numbers. If turnout is down or the vote is split, Democrats — who regularly lose the majority of white voters — will lose.

This reality means that African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans can make political demands. Politicians must compete to win our votes. The power of this can be seen with the Dreamers and the Democrats’ embrace of comprehensive immigration reform, with Black Lives Matter and Democratic candidates putting criminal justice reform at the top of their agendas. Voting rights and equal rights under the law also gain traction.

Two weeks before the Ohio primary, OSU head football coach Urban Meyer was having none of that endorsement stuff. He said he was not going to run that play.

Coach Meyer had been burned in 2013 when he apparently was pressured by Columbus' big money dilberts to endorse the Columbus school levy. The tax measure went down in the flames.

Bad play. Don't run it again, coach.

Meyer may have stuck to that playbook until Donald Trump said at a rally in early March that Meyer had “said good things about him (Trump).” Trump did not claim an endorsement but the implication that Ohio's most popular public figure was in Trump's corner was inescapable.