I think my favorite one is “An armed society is a polite society”.
If you have to be constantly under threat that being a dickhead will get you shot by some rando who takes exception to your behavior, then that’s not really very polite, now, is it?
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Err, sports team wins and losses get front page news quite often, just as one example. Your claim literally has no basis in reality.
As a note to bwv812: Not everyone here is a one-time poster. Try another assertion, perhaps?
That said, YES, this is amusingly ironic, I don’t care who you are. Even in an area where open-carry is legal, you are still obligated to responsibly care for, carry, and use your gun, plain and simple ^^’ …
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For the record, the mugger DID compliment the guy’s gun before taking it.
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I don’t imagine it happens often, but that’s because open carry is still not super common (as opposed to ipods, for example), and like most robberies you have to catch the victim unprepared and/or isolated. Statistically, if lots more people carried guns openly then there would be a lot more chances for this to happen, and criminals would get wise to the opportunities all around them.
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Bravo my friend!
This wouldn’t have happened if everyone around them had been carrying guns.
…What do you mean, “gangs”?
And I suppose, when you get right down to it, sharing is caring.
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Sports team wins and loses are one of the least significant/important kinds of data in the world. The premise stays.
It has however a hole in case of events that, while rare, affect enough people. Like a major war (or even a minor one if your group happen to be in its area) or an asteroid impact.
I get the impression that people are laughing at this guy not so much because he was a victim.
I think it has more to do with advocates from the NRA and similar groups often to claim that carrying a gun around will make a person safer from crime.
In this case quite the opposite occurred, walking around with a gun made him a target for crime. A crime committed with the aid of a gun no less.
That’s some rich irony right there.
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I’m not sure about the fedora, but has anyone seen a non-white male exercising his right to open carry?
I can’t imagine a hispanic, asian, middle eastern or african american carrying a gun in public and not being confronted by police immediately. Open carry has always seemed like a right only available to white people to me.
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A longer article about this, from the local newspaper (the Oregonian) is here, with the interesting update (scroll to oldest comments) that the victim’s gun was unloaded.
(As a Portland resident – Gresham’s just east of Portland – I had no idea you could openly carry firearms in Gresham. Huh.)
I think it’s a lot more likely that he’s just some Greshamite with a chip on his shoulder who’s compensating for something, but, you know, if be is a real cowboy from Prineville or somewhere, more power to him. (That said, a Walther P-22 isn’t a very cowboy gun. I’d be surprised to see anyone packing one of those east of about Bend.)
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Is a gun really an effective anti-tyranny device anymore? Can small arms do much against tanks and F-16’s? Not trying to be glib - I’m genuinely curious what people think.
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In Washington state, you may open carry any firearm as long as you’re in legal standing to buy one (background check is clean, and you’re 18 for a longun or 21 for a pistol). In fact, if you do not have a concealed carry permit, you can’t even load a pistol into a vehicle for transport. So basically, if you don’t have a concealed carry permit, it’s perfectly legal to walk around carrying a loaded 12 gauge in your hands in the middle of town (granted, you’d likely be charged with disturbing the peace, or disorderly conduct, or whatever excuse there is for being fucking scary in public areas), but it’s illegal to buy a pistol, put it in the trunk of your car, and drive it home.
I’m pretty sure all the open carry stuff has to do with police awareness. The police either want to be able to see that you have a weapon, or be able to look you up in the state database to find out if you’re carrying so they can choose to open fire with the alibi that they know you are armed.
Whoosh.
I have a major subset of the tools in my shop. But it is a significant investment to be sunk in (never forget to add the tool bits into the estimations!).
Saw that in Wired. A bit costly, a bit lousy, good the tech proliferates.
And it will be, possibly forever. In an extreme example, way beyond our scope, horse buggies also weren’t entirely displaced by cars. Film cameras still exist in special applications, not entirely displaced by digital ones.
There’s a 3d-printed gun from some such company, made by laser sintering of metal powder. So you are right in this aspect. But that does not mean that the machines won’t be available way beyond the scope of big shops and big vendors. Cheap laser printers did not displace printing houses, too. They just brought much more opportunities to the hands of the commoners.
Making this kind of statements is somewhat risky, given the historical precedents. Look at the rear-view mirror. (Though I think retail won’t be entirely displaced, just grossly limited. Toy industries will be particularly hard-hit. And I foresee a hybrid economy, where most of the product is bought and then upgraded with printed/machined parts.)
Given the usefulness of the printers outside of the fairly narrow gunsmithing sector, their proliferation is a matter of time. We already see the lousy plastic filament printers in malls; matter of not-so-long time until laser-sintering MMC rigs will stand next to lathes and drill presses in Harbor Freight.
Parallel to them, there will be also many made on the rigs bought in Harbor Freight, from generic made-in-China steel-and-carbon-nanotubes powder.
The point of balance is to be discussed but there will be both approaches out there. (Complicated by the bigger vendors being augmented by many smaller ones, some just with friends-and-family as customer base, as the barrier-to-entry falls.)
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Small arms (rifle) fire can take down a low-flying fighter. Happened e.g. in the Falklands War. More here, part F.
Tanks are more difficult. Some infantry tactics here. A missile from the side is a better bet, the weakest spots are the sides and the tracks, and the top with hatches. If the tank unbuttons and a crewmember pokes out (common due to poor visibility from the inside otherwise), it becomes a soft target vulnerable to small arms fire. Pew!
Plus the possibilities to render the tanks immobile by getting them entangled in rubble or other difficult terrain. The WW2 tanker stories are a rich trove of possible tactics. Especially in cities, tanks are very vulnerable. Military operations in urban terrain (MOUT) are not exactly easy; heavy arms are more likely to be used to shell the city from distance than to actually go into built-up areas.
These targets are difficult but not invulnerable.
Open carrying a gun that you can’t fire would seem to be incredibly stupid.
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It doesn’t make much sense. Maybe he was trying to make a political statement.
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Sure, it’s now easier than ever to make ballistic weapons. But why bother? They are primitive and have lots of bureaucracy involved with them. You could also easily make a non-ballistic weapon which was more effective and required no paperwork. Also, nobody else would likely know what it was, or how to use it if they had access.
