People carrying rifles openly are fringe at best.
Every example I can think of off the top of my head (Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, Omaha) has involved killers openly carrying guns from their cars into a building. So, cite?
My point is that there’s a huge difference between somebody coming in with the intent to kill people, and some nut who’s just trying to make a stupid point and has his rifle slung over his shoulder… One is clearly threatening, and the other, not so much.
By actually talking to the guy, you defuse it- it’s no longer confrontational, and even though you may not agree with the guy, you’re not playing into what he wants to see.
Those of you who are acting like it’s some clear and present threat for someone to just have a gun are being nervous nellies, if you ask me. In many (most?) states, the guy in the suit next to you could be packing a pistol and you’d never know it. At least the guy with a rifle has it right there in the open.
When the police get a call about a couple of guys walking around with AR-15s slung over their shoulders, do they typically
A) Roll their eyes at all the nervous nellies in the world, finish whatever more important work they were probably doing, roll up to the situation at their leisure, confirm that the guy looks like he’s just exercising his rights, and ask a few perfunctory questions to make the public happy, or
B) Respond promptly, approach the guys with caution, and ask pertinent questions that will help them determine if the guys are a threat?
In every video I’ve seen, it’s B. Do you disagree with the approach that cops generally take? Do you disagree with my assessment? Or do you think that cops should take the situation seriously and with caution, but that regular civilians should assume that everyone has the best intentions and not be leery?
A fact which, oddly enough, makes a poor anxiolytic for Nellie.
When Shall Issue started becoming widespread a lot of police didn’t like it; not because of public safety concerns, but because they were used to being able to presume that anyone besides police or security guards found with a gun was a bad guy. In other words, the police wanted to keep their “free fire zone”. Something like that seems to be the theme of this thread- people hate that Deranged Killers™ cannot be picked out immediately on sight. Well let me put it this way: If you DID see a Deranged Killer™, and he was the only one around with a gun, your options would be limited to trying to run or hide while praying that the police (you know, people with GUNS) get there before you were killed.
I’ve said multiple times that we are currently close to the worst of both worlds: criminals and sociopaths can easily get guns, while most of the law-abiding peaceful people eligible to carry guns don’t do so. If even, say, one out of ten people routinely carried, the whole dynamic would change. People misuse guns on the presumption that they’re the only armed person around, thus thinking that a gun makes them eight feet tall. And spree shooters typically are acting out fantasies of going out in a blaze of glory. When lots of other people have guns, suddenly having a gun doesn’t make someone feel like a tough guy anymore. And getting shot down by some retiree would be a more ignominious death than most spree killers fantasize about.
The pro-carry faction are trying to get us away from our current worst-of-both-worlds towards the direction they think would work better. The problem of course is that gun control advocates are pulling in the opposite direction.
P.S. I’ll say this about carrying long guns: If they’re doing it just to make a point, it would really be a hell of a lot more polite to either carry them cased or at least have a muzzle cap or gun sock on them. Something to indicate “no, I’m not planning to imminently use this gun”.
What about if they wore t-shirts that said, “I’m not planning to imminently use this gun”?
I feel like we’re told by the gun rights guys that a magazine capacity limit is pointless because it’s so easy to change magazines in less than a second, and that someone with a knife is a deadly threat at 7 yards because it takes so long to react. If all of that is true then I don’t know why I should give any special consideration to a holstered or slung weapon, or a muzzle sock for that matter. All of those things can change before I can blink and the weapon could be ready to fire, right?
I guess it does help to convey intention, in that I don’t think spree shooters would waste time on a muzzle sock, but it’s not like I see guys at Chipotle all the time with AR-15s with muzzle socks. I’m not going to say, “Holy shit, this guy has an AR-15 at Chipotle and didn’t put on a muzzle sock!” That tiny detail isn’t going to change the basic situation, which is that it’s strange as fuck for someone to have an AR-15 at Chipotle.
As I pointed out to ChickenLegs above, this is a bizarre and illogical assertion. On the one hand, carry advocates are trying to persuade us that our public space is so full of unpredictable grave threats from the random strangers around us that we should be constantly carrying lethal weapons to defend ourselves.
On the other hand, carry advocates are trying to persuade us that seeing a random stranger actually carrying a lethal weapon in public should cause us no concern whatsoever and we are just being “nervous nellies” if we don’t automatically trust them.
You can’t have it both ways. If the dangerous-stranger threat level is really so high that we should have a significant percentage of the general public constantly armed in order to cope with it, then you can’t expect people to blithely assume that random strangers carrying firearms shouldn’t be regarded as dangerous.
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In many (most?) states, the guy in the suit next to you could be packing a pistol and you’d never know it. At least the guy with a rifle has it right there in the open.
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That’s no argument, because I don’t automatically trust the competence or good intentions of a random stranger practicing concealed carry any more than I trust a random stranger practicing open carry.
I accept the risk of not knowing whether people around me are concealed-carrying, because if somebody is legally entitled to carry a concealed weapon, then they have a right to privacy about it that overrides my interest in knowing about a potential threat. But that doesn’t mean that I automatically assume that anybody who’s concealed-carrying can be safely trusted with a gun in public, any more than open-carriers can.
Face it, folks, there are law-abiding licensed gun owners doing stupid or reckless or violent things with guns every day. I’m quite well aware that the majority of gun owners don’t do such things, but there is absolutely no a priori reason for me to take it for granted that some random stranger whom I know nothing about is in the “reliable” camp.
And the mindless playground taunts that some carry advocates like to throw around with regard to “nervous nellies” or “chickenshit” or “city people” aren’t going to persuade me to abandon that reasonable level of skeptical distrust. In fact, when I see how obliviously many carry advocates try to insist on illogical and contradictory arguments to bolster their position, it makes me even less likely to assume that these people can be safely trusted to handle dangerous weapons in public.
This is the crux of the open carry movement. The primary goal is to change people’s expectations. They want an environment where when you see someone who is openly carrying you are not alarmed or afraid.
I fully grant that in many areas open carry is not common and therefore it seems very reasonable to be wary. In other environments, open carry is more common and therefore it causes less concern. The open carry movement has as one of its goals to normalize the behavior such that it is nothing out of the ordinary. Think of it as a form of advocacy.
There are other goals for the movement as well. Nationwide there is a right to keep and bear arms. What that means has not been clarified at the SCOTUS level, but several circuit courts have opined on the matter coming to different conclusions. Consider in places like CA where until recently, it was illegal to carry open a loaded weapon, but it was legal to carry openly an unloaded weapon (with various convoluted restrictions on where that can be done). People organized open carry protests where they would carry unloaded weapons openly, go on marches, do roadside/beach/park cleanup, carry flyers to educate, and notify police ahead of time of their plans. Again this was advocacy.
Of course, this prompted the legislature to ban the practice which meant that people in CA effectively had no ability to exercise their right to bear arms. This lead to the circuit court ruling that the state must allow some form of carry. If that’s true and withstands appeal, then CA can choose to either permit open, concealed, or both. But they would not be able to prohibit all.
Also consider that over 30 states permit open carry. Carrying firearms for the purpose of being ready for armed conflict is part of the second amendment. But many police are not aware of the law. Gun laws vary by state and in some cases by locality. The person who is advocating must know these laws very well, else they be at risk of committing a felony and being prohibited from owning firearms for life. The police are under no such burden. If they get the law wrong, it’s the non police that suffer the consequence - either through detention, arrest, wrongful prosecution, and legal fees, or worse.
In Wisconsin, which is an open carry state, police had a habit of harassing people who carried openly, arresting them for disorderly conduct, performing felony stops (full takedown, cuffs, arrest, etc.). Their state attorney general had to release instruction that this was a legal practice since conceal carry was prohibited. After some incident where people who were openly carrying were charged with disorderly conduct, Madison dropped charges and paid to settle a lawsuit against the city. Subsequently, the Wisconsin became a shall issue state so now all of its non-prohibited residents can obtain a carry license if they wish.
The whole point of the open carry movement is advocacy. I wish the people engaged in it acted as true ambassadors of the movement and represented it well - but sadly that’s not always the case. That doesn’t mean the movement is without merit.
AFAICT, what’s ultimately driving many carry advocates’ logic fail on this issue is a sort of pop-culture neo-Manicheanism seeping up from superhero action movies and the like.
Their position makes sense in their own minds because it assumes a fundamental binary division between “good guys” and “bad guys”. They want us all to be so concerned about “bad guys” that we’ll approve of having thousands of “good guys” constantly armed in our public spaces in order to stop them.
But they get terribly miffed when it’s pointed out that a reasonable person has no foolproof way of knowing whether a particular random stranger happens to be a “good guy” or a “bad guy”. They are so indignant at the notion that a “good guy” could possibly be mistaken for a “bad guy” that they insist that anybody who could confuse the two must just be a coward or a fool or laughably ignorant.
In the real world outside of superhero action movies, of course, we know that such a clear distinction between “good guys” and “bad guys” doesn’t exist, and also that there isn’t a reliable correlation between good intentions and safety. In some real-world circumstances, you’re actually safer being mugged by an armed robber than having an armed vigilante attempt to rescue you from the mugger. Sorry if that interferes with the heroic self-image of the “good guys”, but this is real life we’re talking about here, and rational skepticism is appropriate.
“Just hand over the money and no one’ll get hurt”? :mad: That’s a little like a rapist saying he won’t hurt you if you don’t scream. Now maybe if you’ve been totally ambushed it might be your least lousy option, but that doesn’t make it a desirable course of action. Maybe an individual situation with an attacker and an armed would-be rescuer will turn out badly, but you’re still ignoring the herd immunity factor: if every single time that someone tried to commit robbery, rape or assault they were taking a significant risk of getting shot or killed, the aggressors with a lick of sense would be deterred, and the ones without would not have long careers.
And that is all I’m saying. You can skip the convoluted hypothetical about how on the whole and overall and in the long run an armed citizenry would or probably would or at least might keep us safer from armed criminals, maybe.
My point is just that a reasonable person has no a priori reason to take it for granted that any particular random stranger whom they don’t know anything about can be relied upon to handle a gun safely in public.
That’s not really in question - I agree. It doesn’t matter though since these people are exercising their rights. At some point, if they succeed, it will be as ordinary as seeing someone driving a car, riding a bike, talking on the phone, breast feeding in public, or having a beer.
. . . Or it could backfire on gun rights advocates and go the OPPOSITE way. Where enough people will be so put off by the gun advocates that it’ll lead to either a string of court rulings or even possibly, a constitutional amendment to make those “absolute gun rights”, the advocates say the constitution grants them, to be not so “absolute”.
It could. It’s not going that way right now though, generally. The battle over conceal carry for pistols has largely been won. 41 states permit or allow without restriction the conceal carry of firearms. I’m not sure the direction of the open carry movement since it’s not really my thing, but 30+ states permit or allow without restriction open carry.
*I will nitpick and say that the constitution does not grant these rights, it merely recognizes them. That’s probably a different thread.
I completely agree.
I happen to think that gun ownership should not be a constitutional right, but nonetheless, even if/when the Second Amendment is repealed at some point, I support keeping it legal for responsible law-abiding people to have and use guns if they want to.
Sometimes having or using a gun is a smart and prudent thing to do, and sometimes it’s a stupid and dangerous thing to do. But I feel that other people are entitled to do even somewhat stupid and dangerous things if they want to, even if it sometimes entails increased risk for me. The tradeoffs between prudence, risk, and freedom to do what you want should be hashed out in legislatures and courts in a continual process of argument and compromise.
My point in this thread is simply that carry advocates shouldn’t try to pretend that carriers should automatically be regarded as trustworthy, just because they want to be able to carry without having strangers distrust them. People who are legally entitled to carry are free to do so, and I am free to exercise rational skepticism about their trustworthiness. That’s all.
And I’m not buying into any taunts or scoldings or illogical arguments attempting to deny or dismiss my rational skepticism. Carry legally all you want to, but don’t piss on my neck and tell me it’s raining.
Fine, but if every time someone open carried it generated a “Man with a Gun!!” call to 911, either the right to carry would become a dead letter or the police would end up having to shrug it off as a panic call.
A mission similar to that of the Open Flatulence movement, whose constituents believe that if they release enough ass gas in public places, people will stop wrinkling their noses.
So what’s wrong with the first option? Open carry isn’t constitutionally protected. If hunters open carry out in the country and a handful of people open carry sidearms in places where it doesn’t cause alarm, then open carry can stay legal. If a bunch of jackholes start open carrying AR-15s to Chipotle in order to make open carrying AR-15s into Chipotle socially acceptable (for some pointless reason) and everyone constantly calls the cops on them, then we can ban open carry and blame the jackholes for ruining the party for everyone.