New Jersey. Concealed carry is supposedly legal but except for law enforcement it’s basically impossible to get a permit.
I live in Northern Virginia, and though I don’t personally own guns, I grew up with them and have several friends that do regularly carry. In Virginia, it is legal to open carry without any sort of permit, and though one is required for concealed carry, they’re fairly easy to get. That said, the general advice they give, and that I agree with, is that if one is going to carry, one should generally carry concealed unless there’s good reason not to.
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Open carrying largely defeats the purpose. The opposing argument is that if someone is planning to start a situation wherein reacting with deadly force would be appropriate, visually seeing someone with a gun might dissuade them. This seems fair, but the counter points to that are, if someone is thinking rationally, they’ll either go target someone or some place else (if it’s a crime of opportunity like robbing a bank or convenience store) or they’ll specifically target you first, possibly even before you can react. And if they’re not rational, they’ll just go ahead anyway. On the other hand, if you’re concealed, you have the opportunity to interject in both cases just as well. In fact, part of the idea is that if enough people are carrying concealed, it acts sort of like herd immunity in that no one is ever really sure whether people are armed or not in a given situation, so at least the somewhat more rational people may just decide not to try.
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Uncomfortable and awkward situations. From the friends I’ve talked to who have open carried, they do tell me that generally they get far more positive interactions than negative ones, such as people asking questions about guns, how they can do it legally (just be able to legally own it, at least here), or whatever. Even most of the negative interactions are just people being uncomfortable but not really doing much. However, I’ve also heard enough horrible stories, where even if they’re rare, they’re awful. For example, people raising massive scenes in stores when they see it, screaming and yelling at them for making everyone unsafe, yelling at employees to ban the person from the store, getting the manager involved, and generally just making everyone miserable. This just won’t happen if you carry concealed because they’ll never know.
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Along the same lines as above, being polite to other people. For people that are pro-gun or are more or less neutral, they’re probably aware that there are people concealed carrying. Personally, I pretty rarely see people open carrying here, but knowing that something like 1/12 Virginians have a permit, I expect that in any sufficiently large gathering, there’s probably people there that are carrying. And for people that are anti-gun for whatever reason, they just don’t have to know, they won’t feel uncomfortable, won’t raise a scene, whatever.
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Interactions with police. As you mentioned, this can be a problem. As attested by my friends, most police are aware of the laws and are even friendly with and glad to see citizens taking responsibility. However, I’ve also heard stories along the lines of anti-gun people raising scenes, where a cop might single someone out for open carrying in a place where it’s uncommon. Hell, this could be particularly troublesome for certain people. For example, I saw a video a black guy open carrying completely legally, and being detained at gun point–eventually handcuffed and arrested–where a well-dressed white guy carrying the same weapon in the same area was still given a lecture from a cop about how he shouldn’t be open carrying, despite it being legal, but at least didn’t have a gun pointed at him nor was handcuffed. Again, even believing the most cops know the laws, aren’t any more racist than the general population, and actually tend to be more pro-gun than average, this is a situation that can just easily be avoided by concealing.
And, really, why would you want to consistently carry a weapon that’s uncomfortable to conceal? Really, other than a weapon possibly being slightly easier to pull in an emergency when unconcealed, with a good weapon and holster, that difference ought to be negligible, possibly even being advantageous in certain emergency situations, and in most other situations better.
Personally, if I did own a gun and wanted to carry, for general purposes I’d really only consider open carrying in a situation like heading to a gun shop, gun show, hunting. The only exception in my personal experience would be when my brother, in his youth, got some bad people upset with him and they made death threats, so my dad was open carrying from then until the cops showed up. Seriously, it took the police over two hours to respond when there were, and we informed them, there were people on the property yelling death threats claiming they have a gun!?!?