Remember when I said the rabid open carry zealots weren’t helping?
Well, here you go.
When it comes to private property, the Second Amendment means only what the property owner says it does. One carries a firearm on private property at the pleasure of the owners; they have the right to stop the practice for any reason they see fit, and that includes “none at all”.
Make them exasperated/annoyed/angry/fearful enough, and they are within their rights to end the practice. While recent events may have been the “straw that broke the camel’s back”, I’m convinced well-publicized open carry shenanigans made its practitioners an easy target.
And that doesn’t help the rest of us.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: if we don’t police our own, someone else will do it for us — and we won’t like the result.
Grant Cunningham
One thing I have noticed a lot since Walmart declared its stores Off Limits to Open Carry was not the butt hurt responses of the OCI (Open Carry Idiots) but how many other Gun Owners simply said “They had it coming” or words to that effect. In fact, the number of people expressing their disgust for the OC Ultra activists was a bit of a surprise and what is worse: it does not look like anybody is willing to lift a finger to help them.
The No Compromise crowd is suddenly getting an education on political reality. They burned so much of the good will of the regular Gun Owner, they find themselves alone when the tide shifted. They ignored the request of toning down their activism and make it palatable to more people, but they flipped fellow gun owners and carried on. Gun Owners remained silent as to show an united front and not sabotage the efforts, we basically ate a bowl of macaroni and shit and remained silent as if we liked it. So they won all, but events now show it was a pyrrhic victory. And you know? Maybe a simple “Thank you for helping pass Open Carry, guys!” may have alleviated the rancor, but not even that happened
As for Florida, we can count on being without Open Carry for the foreseeable future and in part thanks to those “activists” that had to look like rejects from a war movie and parade in tactical regalia because ultimately “Muh Rights!” apparently did not include the rights of those states still without OC. We will have to deal with the fear of getting a police department that will not make a distinction between accidental exposure and brandishing.
Thank you.
I live in an open carry state, but prefer to cary concealed, primarily for tactical reasons (i.e. I look like a harmless fat old man ’till the rosco comes out, hopefully as a surprise). In today’s political climate, I do not understand anyone who slings an AR over his or her shoulder and walks around an urban area because they can. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Yeah, I can probably walk around town in my skivvies, assuming every thing is covered up, doesn’t mean I should, nor does it mean I won’t have a pointed conversation with the local constabulary.
I grew up in New York (the state, not the city), and my dad for reasons unexplained (although I suspect it originally had to do with a government job often necessitating the carrying of a sidearm and being a bit of a Brooklyn Cowboy) had a full-carry NY pistol permit, and acquaintances who carried badges and Detective Specials or J-frame Smiths in places such as Getty Square, and above 96th Street in Manhattan during the 1960s and 1970s.
When I got my pistol permit, they told me that carrying concealed is the way to go because you won’t scare regular citizens, and bad guys won’t shoot at you first. Now in these Internet days I suspect that there are a bunch of online commentators who will say they’re wrong, and give various reasons based on whatever data they come up with, but their advice seemed pretty common sense to me, and their experience dealing with the dregs of society in pretty rough neighborhoods is a solid qualification in my book. Especially when we see what type of crap-storm came from the open-carry types.