I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t care where you come down on the gun debate, open-carry activists aren’t doing people any favors. (And that includes themselves.)
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[Totes off topic]
I was talking with some friends about words we snicker at like fifth graders. One was a gun. A caulk gun.
(The other one that we all agreed sounded derdy was kumquat.)
[Please, carry on. Openly]
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Hard as I try, I’m really having a hard time feeling any sympathy here for the OC or CC enthusiasts.
Don’t get me wrong, I like and enjoy firearms. I don’t like them in the hands of strangers in public places. And I don’t feel that the solution to that discomfort is to in turn carry a firearm of my own.
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What do expect them to carry? A forked stick doesn’t macho up the cowboy getup like a low-slung holster, eh?
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You work at Microsoft? I remember coworkers doing what you describe because guns were banned on campus.
Strangely enough, the dipshit you put in your comment lives in the next county. We don’t normally hear much about him since he’s something of a pariah. My point is, well, proximity to the most dangerous city (perception, not reality) in the US. Yet, I have zero desire to purchase a firearm. Why? Well, I’m not scared shitless of my own shadow, for starters. My house is also far more likely to get broken into when I’m not there. Turns out most petty thiefs not riddled with meth would prefer to not be shot. Weird, eh?
@awjt: Things certainly have changed in Texas since I was a kid. At some point, open carry was made illegal? Only place in the US I’ve seen someone other than LEO or military with a visible firearm in public was in Ft. Worth.
What are the repercussions of being in a private place that has posted the signs, other than showing a lack of respect for the property owner?
If you’re carrying concealed, no one should be able to tell. Even the property owner. So no harm, no foul.
If you’re forced to draw (perhaps a bad guy with a gun is us robbing the store), claim self defence, which I think might (should?) trump disobeying a sign and offending the property owner.
You’re definitely bad at identifying anteaters, because that’s an armadillo.
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I’m actually kind of surprised no one has organized an effort to flood the police with calls when they see people with guns (well, not that surprised, it is Texas…).
All these “good guys with a gun” have refused to get the words “Good Guy” tattooed on their foreheads, so most people will probably have a hard distinguishing them from the bad guys.
As a secondary “experiment”, it would interesting to see what would happen if some decidedly “non-Texan” looking folks organized an open carry gathering…
Australian. I work in the bush as my everyday job. My main hobbies include bushwalking, rockclimbing and desert motorcycle touring. I have close-up encounters with lethally venomous creatures on an extremely regular basis. Swam with crocs a few times, too.
Never held a gun [1], never seen a need for a gun. Rather noticeably not dead.
[1] Actually, the only time I’ve seen a gun fired in real life was at my uncle’s Vietnam Vet reunion, where a few of them had a nostalgic shot or two with M-16s (it was on an army base; I rode in an M-113 as it crushed a car, which was fun for a six year old). I’ve never seen a police officer unholster their weapon, either.
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So you agree that the right to bear arms exists in the context of a well-regulated militia, so most gun owners are violating the Constitution? Excellent.
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Exactly. Open carrying in private businesses and out in the streets of a town is nothing short of a threat of violence as far as I’m concerned. It’s saying “I have a gun, and I think it’s okay to kill people sometimes.”
And it’s even worse if it ain’t some macho violence-fantasy guy. Someone walking around who is genuinely afraid with a gun is far more dangerous.
If you want to walk around proclaiming to everyone that you think that killing someone is an acceptable way of solving a dispute, then it necessarily follows that such dickweeds can be kicked out of any establishment that feels that such threat displays are bad for business.
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Here’s how to embed an image:
<\img src=“http://url.to/your/image.jpg”>
be sure to remove the \ before “img”. I’ve been having trouble figuring out how to get the img tag to display without mangling it. For most of the stuff here, all you need to do is put a \ before the code and the \ will disappear and the code will remain rendered as text. But for some reason that doesn’t seem to work with img tags.
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<img src=“http://url.to/your/image.jpg”>
: P
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Are those like TruckNutz?
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I wonder how comfortable a store owner might feel walking up to a person who, having not followed the Concealed Carry Honor/Dress Code quite to the letter, did not entirely and perfectly conceal their firearm? A store owner should feel safe enough to ask the Poorly Concealed Carrier to leave the premises, but we’re talking about a random store owner having the gumption to walk up to someone who is carrying a firearm for unknown purposes (are they there to rob the store? Are they a LEO? Are they wanting to massacre the locals?). So yeah, harm. Foul.
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Oh please. Here in western Canada, cowboys still have bears, wolves and cougars to deal with but the lack of access to handguns is a non-issue and open carry is strictly illegal.
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Sigh. It isn’t just for the militia. The militia is comprised of armed people. In order to have a pool of armed people gather into a militia, they all need the right to bear arms. It says right there, “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” What mental gymnastics do you have to jump through to think it applies to only militias?
Furthermore, the “well regulated” isn’t about having militias well regulated via laws, but it means that it was properly equipped and in proper working order and trained. If you read militia requirements of the time you were REQUIRED to have a gun, so much powder, so many balls, plus other gear like boots, food, clothing, etc.
Remember original the US had an extremely tiny standing army. In fact the war of 1812 first really put this concept into action and it didn’t work out so great. But you have to understand that originally the founding fathers were coming from place where the military was used to enforce the whims of a corrupt government. The theory was that if the newly formed US gov didn’t have a large standing army in times of peace, there wouldn’t be a tool for a corrupt leader to oppress people.
One could argue that because the original reason for the amendment was to have an armed populace to be able to pull from when forming a militia, that it’s original intent is a bit outdated with our massive standing army. You can’t argue that as it is written it isn’t a personal right.
What mental gymnastics do you have to jump through to think it applies to only militias?
Reading the first clause of the damned sentence, that’s what. It’s unequivocal.
