A lot of talk about open carry
Idiots carrying long guns around in public. Most of it is silliness on both sides of the argument.
Me, I could give a crap. I OC’d at a local cigar bar last fall, (it was, after all, OC night) and since it was long gun night I oc’d my double. It was a bunch of fun. But I didn’t go to Target with it. Or walmart, which is closer.
We are in the habit, as a country, of moving heaven and earth to accommodate the wants (NOT the needs) of ludicrously small groups. Why should gun nuts be any different? Most of the rest of what I hear is “What I do is perfectly normal, and what you do is fucking weird” That to me is a knife with two blades and no handle.
Amen.
Apply the logic test to the core O/C argument that open carry “normalizes” the idea of guns for hoplophobes.
You get fail, simply because hoplophobia is irrational to start with, and a “normal” teaching method is not designed to work with irrational students.
Psych theory says that before an afflicted irrational can learn by rational teaching methods, first, the cause of the irrationality must be investigated and addressed.
The O/C folks are poseurs. Posing is, in itself, irrational.
If you want to be armed, arm yourself, BE yourself, blend into the irrational world and survive. That is all anyone needs from arming for defensive purposes.
Arming for power projection is a horse of a different color.
I think the open carry crowd is using a model of a different constitutional right and the civil rights movement of 50 years ago. The difference is that the feds came down heavily on the side of the people entering lunch counters and the segregated places that were the equivalent of today’s Walmart and Target, which forced the issue, I’m willing to make a bet with long odds that that will not happen in this case, and the media will gleefully film the firehoses and attack dogs and riot police.
Just because they CAN carry the long rifle into the local pancake house does not mean they SHOULD.
These jerks are not helping the cause at all.
Apply the logic test to the core O/C argument that open carry “normalizes†the idea of guns for hoplophobes.
I think the argument is that open carry normalizes the normal. Screw the hoplophobes, they will never come around until their idiocy is obvious to even themselves. But the everyday person who is merely ignorant and not crazy can be reached.
Giraffe, how many HAVE been “normalized”? Without metrics, how do we know if we have succeeded or failed?
‘Nother question: how do the O/C folks tell a ” normalization” candidate from a hoplophobe? I posit that such divination can’t be done on a repeatable basis, and if it can’t, the entire O/C process is a crapshoot not worth jeopardizing current gun rights over.