As a police officer, if you saw someone walking on the street with a weapon like the AR-15, would this draw your interest as a potential threat ? No snark or disrespect interned here but I posed this to a friend who was the chief in the Bay Area town we lived in, and he would have called for a couple of uniformed officers to investigate. Since this is a single data point I wanted another knowledgeable person like yourself to comment.
Things are much different here. Open carry is not legal. Concealed carry permits are technically possible to get but in reality it doesn’t happen. So anyone who is not actively hunting in rural areas who is carrying a weapon either concealed or open who is not wearing a badge is 99% of the time a bad guy. We have some of the toughest gun laws in the country including an assault weapon ban. If I lived in a state in which the laws were different and saw someone complying with those laws I would not feel threatened. Those places that have open carry tend to have very low rates of gun violence. I don’t think those two things correlate directly, there are other factors.
How is it not a threat? Open carry is the clearest possible non-verbal way of expressing “I am willing to kill you.” You might try to justify it as “self-defense only” but they fact that you are carrying and carrying* openly* is the clearest indicator that your first and only line of defense will be a threat of death and there is no way for anyone else to determine where your breaking point might be. Your definition of what a “threat” might be could be very much lower what a reasonable person might be, therefore the rest of the world has to assume that you are a danger to others.
Even people whose job it is to carry, like Police and Armed Security are making the same threat, they are just backed up by other social authority.
What other possible message do you think you are sending other that “I will kill you”?
“Hey guys, you’ll use your weapons to protect me if I exercise my first amendment rights?!”
“Hell yeah we will! America!”
<proceed to draw a dogshit mustache on a picture of Jesus in front of stunned crowd>
“Thanks guys!”
You have the legal right to kill someone to prevent death or serious bodily injury to yourself or others regardless of if you open carry, concealed carry or pick up a pointed stick when needed.
I quite agree, but there are two issues here … first, are the demonstrators conducting their activity in accordance with federal and local laws? It seems they were, so no reason to object to their behavior from a legal standpoint.
The second issue, for me is: will their demonstration benefit the pro-gum movement by swaying the opinions of voters and even lawmakers in a positive way? Preaching to the choir is a pep-talk, useful in some ways, I guess, but it seems to me that the purpose of a demonstration is to win hearts and minds and change policies. I’m pro-gun rights, but I don’t like seeing right-wingers thumbing their noses at the sensibilities of the fence-sitters. It doesn’t help their cause, and it make a reasonable argument that much harder to make.
Protesting while armed isn’t about preaching to anybody; it’s about intimidating people, not persuade them.
Funny thing is, if they’d been a bunch of armed leftwingers or racial minorities we’d be hearing about how hotheaded and dangerous they are and how the government needs to crack down on them. Including from these very same people; I’m sure most of them would freak out and scream for the police if a bunch of armed black men showed up. That’s certainly how its worked historically.
Perhaps, but that’s just hypocrisy; it doesn’t invalidate carrying arms. I for one think that the Black Panthers were perfectly within their rights to carry guns, and it accomplished its goal of making the police think twice about bullying minorities.
ETA: despite your stated opinions on the matter, pro-gun does not mean racist, reactionary, or proto-fascist.
It demonstrates that the pro-gun people typically don’t mean what they say.
On the contrary, it just targeted the Black Panthers for special attention and persecution, and made it easier to justify going after them.
As a practical matter in modern America it essentially does. Any exceptions are too few to matter in practical terms. They are proto/wannabee-death squad members, not defenders of freedom.
Its so unlike you to paint people with such a broad brush. Are you ok?
“Preaching to the choir” is an adage, not a literal description of preaching. I know you know this, but clearly stating it invalidates part of your point. You are half right. They are bolstering each others confidence.
I’ve seen a lot of fly-over-country ultra-right-wing gun advocates up close and personal … and it’s my opinion that, yes, they are trying to intimidate those who oppose them. That said, they honestly believe guns are so much fun and so cool, that if they display them often enough, they will actually persuade some percentage of undecideds.
It’s bad judgment on their part. Like a KKK march in a minority neighborhood, or a Gay Rights demonstration at a Xtian Fundamentalist function. It gets attention, but it’s attention for doing something inflammatory instead of constructive.