That the right to keep and bear arms is important and worthy of protection.
And words just don’t do the job?
The statement is, “I carry I gun, and I’m just like you.” Carrying a gun and appearing ordinary in other respects sends the message that, contrary to the uniformed and hysterical fears some might have, gun owners are the same as ordinary citizens.
It’s a variant of this approach that leads some in the gay community to believe that outing people is of value. The populace at large will be more comfortable with gays when they realize that, apart from sexual and romantic practices, The Gay Man is just like your next door neighbor; the Lesbian is just like the store cler. That they are not fearsome caricatures, but ordinary people.
Yup, that’s certainly the impression I got from this rally.
Here’s the thing, though - it’s easy enough to understand that people want to have relationships with the people they fall in love with. The mind-set of a gay man or woman in this regard is no different from anyone else’s.
But I would submit that the mind-set of a person who carries his or her gun everywhere they go is profoundly different from those who do not. At the end of the day, a handgun is designed to kill other human beings - what are we to make of a person who insists on maintaining that capacity at all times?
Gun-owners like to say that they carry handguns for personal defense. But, Bricker, you’ve insisted in this thread that we must dispassionately, rationally evaluate the risks we face from those around us. And the fact of the matter is that violent crime is truly quite rare. Well-publicized, but rare. If memory serves, the County of Arlington had three murders last year.
From my perspective, the man who insists on going armed everywhere he goes is massively over-reacting to fairly minimal risks. The fact that a person who over-estimates risks in that way has the capacity to quickly, efficiently kill or maim anyone in a room with him makes me very nervous. This man’s judgment is suspect, and my life and health rely on his good judgment.
For that matter, the armed man needn’t even draw his gun himself to place me in danger - I’ve seen cops in my old apartment building with their gun-belts slung casually over their shoulders, easy pickings for anyone who wishes to grab them.
In the normal course of my life, I am remarkably safe - I routinely walk my neighborhood, at any time of day or night, without the slightest bit of fear. I like the fact that my life is safe. I cannot see how having folks wandering around with handguns can do anything to make me safer, and it can do a lot to make me less safe. I’m not saying handguns should be banned - I am saying that this is different from, say, PDAs at a gay-rights parade.
You seem to have gotten confused about the topic of conversation. People doing normal, casual open carry as they go about their daily lives are making the statement, “I carry I gun, and I’m just like you.” They seem ordinary in other respects and all that.
People strapping on rifles and handguns and grouping up into something that sure looks like an angry insurrectionist mob isn’t “just like me”. Heck, I kind of resent the implication, if I thought you actually intended to make it.
I carry one of these with me just about everywhere. All times, all situations, all functions I attend.
Oddly enough, it comes in useful pretty often. Is that a fetish?
Yes, but not the kind you mean.
(Dictionary.com : 1. an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency. )
It has the POWER! (and has been used as a hammer.)
Sure. But the County of Arlington is in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a “shall-issue” concealed carry state and a state where open carry of a firearm does not require a permit.
Just five miles away is the city of Washington, DC, which so tightly controls guns that, despite a Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to possess handguns, still does not allow its residents a legal way to purchase firearms.
And DC had a welcome drop in the number of murders in 2009: “only” 141.
But here’s where you seem impervious to logic: despite that chain of reasoning, we don’t see concealed-carry permit holders committing crime in any great numbers. The rate is vanishingly small. Yet this fact somehow fails to enter your calculus. You have, in other words, the opportunity to test your hypothesis and you seem to recoil from the chance to do so.
And gay pride parades with participants engaging in over-the-top sexualized behavior are not “just like you” either. But they feel as though there is value for this part of their lives to be known. It would be dishonest, somehow, if people who normally carried handguns took them off before attending a rally, wouldn’t it?
Not at all - I accept your contention that, just as with the general population, the number of violent crimes committed by concealed-carry permit holders is very small. However, here’s the problem: a person with a lawfully carried gun who chooses to engage in unlawful violence has a massively increased capacity to do so.
To an extent, the slight risk of violence is something we live with every day - the man next to me on the bus may decide he dislikes my looks, or something, and lob a punch at me. That’s bad, certainly - but it would be very difficult for a punch to kill me. Even a series of punches would be very unlikely to kill me. However, if this same man has a gun - well, then he can easily inflict injuries that I probably will not survive.
You say that the man with the lawfully carried gun is very unlikely to do this - and I agree. However, I would need further evidence to convince me that this fellow is substantiall less likely to engage in unprovoked violence than the general public.
That’s why people carrying guns in public make me nervous - it isn’t that they necessarily make violence more likely. Indeed, violence is never very likely. However, they introduce the danger that violence, if it occurs, will be much less survivable. I’m more comfortable with the everyday risk that some jackass will punch me than I am with an everyday risk that some jackass will shoot me.
So suppose I were able to show you that concealed-carry permit holders were substantially LESS likely to be arrested for violent crime than the general public, and even less likely to have that violent crime involve a firearm, and much likely to be ultimately cleared?
Hang on, are you suggesting that the vast majority of civilians who have killed people with guns, are likely to have already had a criminal record?
Yes, I’d like to see that evidence, please.
Now, now!
We’re trying to get away from theorizing about the psychosexual peculiarities of the Extreme Gun Lovers.
Aren’t you a lawyer, or at least a law student? Done any domestic or criminal work?
So far in 2010, I’ve been threatened at least three times, been escorted from the courthouse or had my client escorted twice, and had it not been for the timely intervention of a bailiff, I would have been assaulted in the frakkin Courthouse just last week.
Of the guys that threatened me, one is facing trial for aggravated assault for shooting my client prior to my involvement in the case. Another one is a convicted felon. The third was just an asshole, but he was a large guy and capable of violence.
There are real threats out there. I don’t want to be on CNN as “the lawyer that got killed by an abusive litigant”.
Carrying a firearm for defense is like having insurance. The chance of an event happening where you need one is not that great, but the consequence of that rare event occurring are so severe that insurance is a worthwhile cost. Violent crime may be rare, but it happens. I’m not familiar with how large Arlington County is, but using crimereports.com, and isolating for only violent crime (sexual, robbery, breaking and entering, homicide), I pull up over 25 incidents in the last 14 days just in the Arlington, Virginia area alone.
I’m in CA where gun laws are particularly prohibitive. In Los Angeles County, there was recently a week where there were 25 homicides! And that is down from previous years rates. I agree that violent crime is rare. The consequences of it however are severe. The chance of any particular house burning down is also rare, but fire insurance is prevalent. I know the act of insuring a property does not carry the same potential danger to others as carrying a firearm, but the concept is analogous. The cost to others needs to be added to the calculus in the case of carrying the firearm vs insuring the house.
So, you’re claiming that these guys regularly carry both hanguns and unloaded rifles strapped to their backs everywhere they go? And questioning their choice to do so at this rally is challening them to dishonestly change this normal behavior?
I find this kind of implausible.
Look, I get why you’re trying to paint this rally as anything, anything other than what it was - because what it was was not adviseable or supportable from any angle. (If it were you would already have done so, rather than consistently trying to move goalposts and direct attention elsewhere.)
Also, do you seriously think that these people who attended the rally are a sufficiently representative subset of gun-carriers in general so as to be able to rationally extrapolate from those on-average quite peaceful ranks to these more-than-averagely emotionally invested and agitated protesters? Because I don’t.
I’m a lawyer, albeit a new one. I’ve not done criminal or domestic work before, but I certainly recognize that some people might need to carry guns routinely in order to counter a greater-than-normal danger to their safety. And Oakminster, certainly none of us want to see you on CNN either. 
But that level of threat is unusual.
If you were to show me those statistics, sure, I’d be less nervous about people carrying concealed weapons. A couple caveats, though - given how polarizing this issue is, I’d be reluctant to trust stats that seemed to be playing games with their figures. One of the reasons I could imagine for permit holders being less violent is that the permitting process might weed out the most dangerous applicants. Different states have different processes, though - statistics which conflate results from “may-issue” and the less-rigorous “shall-issue” states would be somewhat less credible than those that separate out the two categories. Further, I’d be much more interested in statistics that isolate crimes involving guns than those that conflate all violent crimes ranging from misdeameanor assault to first-degree murder - plenty of people on both sides of the debate use those sorts of conflated numbers, and they just don’t mean very much.
Even if you could give me those numbers in regards to permit-holders, though, it wouldn’t make me feel much better about the folks who openly carried guns at their far-right protest. I don’t think Virginia even requires a permit for open-carry, so the mechamisms that might make permit-holders less dangerous wouldn’t be at work here.
By the way - I should mention that I’m not saying I think you’d try to feed me bad stats, Bricker. Just that there are a lot of bad stats out there, and sorting out the good ones can be tricky.
The thing I think you’re overlooking is that people that lawfully own and/or carry weapons are responsible for that weapon both legally and morally. They aren’t going to just start shooting people at random. They probably aren’t going to handle weapons in an unsafe manner.
Putting aside my jokes about unfortunate boating accidents, if you were to visit my home, odds are pretty good you might see a weapon somewhere in the vicinity. If you ask me about it, I’ll clear it, show you the empty chamber, and hand it to you to check it out. If you don’t ask about it, then we’ll get on with the beer drinking and football watching or whatever. Would that make you uncomfortable or intimidate you? Why? Yes, my vote probably cancels yours most elections. I like the SEC, you may like one of the lesser conferences. I like Bourbon, you may prefer Scotch. I like guns, you don’t. So what? I’ve managed to live 44 years without shooting anyone, and I’m not likely to start now barring a direct threat to me or mine.
I’m a gun owner. I’m also your buddy Oak. I’m not a homicidal maniac, and I’m damn sure not irresponsible with firearms.
I believe you, Oakminster. That is, I believe you’re a highly responsible gun owner - I assume you’re just pulling my leg about preferring bourbon to Scotch, though. That’s crazy talk. 
You seem to be saying, though, that even the gun-owners who don’t need permits to carry their guns legally aren’t a danger, because they have a moral and legal responsibility not to do anything stupid. I agree that they probably won’t be dangerous, just like most people. But if there’s no permitting process for open-carry, then there’s very little to distinguish the open-carrying population from the population of folks who don’t own guns at all. And we know that that population sometimes does immoral or illegal things. So, when I see a large crowd of open-carrying folks, at a political rally, ranting about government conspiracies and The Evil Libruls, I think I can be forgiven for being taken aback.