In a post yesterday, RF detailed some pretty good reasons why it’s not a good idea to hold someone at gunpoint. Unfortunately, Bernadette Greenwald doesn’t seem to be a member of the Armed Intelligentsia. The Long Islander was the subject of some late night ring-and-run practical jokes that she didn’t really appreciate. And that’s when she got her semi. . .

According to nypost.com, she went outside, fired a shot into the ground and confronted a 17-year-old who was walking by.

[She] was arrested after she pointed a 9 mm handgun at the 17-year-old in front of her N. Forest Avenue home just after 11 p.m. and held him until police arrived — who promptly charged Greenwald with second-degree menacing, reckless endangerment and unlawful use of a weapon, cops said.

Good thing they didn’t put a flaming bag of dog sh!t on her doorstep. She might have aimed that shot a little higher. God knows practical jokers can sometimes go too far. But so can the jokee’s reaction to them. And for hers, we proudly award today’s IGOTD honor to Bernadette.

[h/t Allen V.]

Back in the day, I relocated from Beantown to Hotlanta. Rolling into The City Too Busy To Hate was something of a culture shock. Especially when a gas station attendant strolled up to my RX-7 wearing a big ass Smith & Wesson revolver on his hip. Has anything changed? God I hope not. To wit: “The owner of Gerry’s Shell Food Mart on Willow Street [in New Haven, Connecticut] says he’s been targeted over 100 times in 30 years,” wtnh.com reports. “‘I tell the employee when they come in, just give them the money,” said Gerry Katz, the station’s owner. Katz says he’s had employees tied up and shot. There’s even a bullet hole from one of the incidents. ‘Every single employee has had at one point, a gun to the head,’ Katz said.” Wow. When are we crackers going to get a clue, take a cue from our friends south of the Mason Dixon line and tool-up? Seriously. When? [h/t to my eldest for the tune]

Thanks to decades of gun control, there are parts of America where legally-armed civilians are so rare that the boys in blue don’t consider the possibility that a man holding a gun could be a good guy. New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Providence, RI. The idea of a defensive gun use by an average Joe in these “gun free” zones is so outside the realm of police experience that they make a simple and sometimes deadly connection: gun = threat. Period. They shoot first, ask questions later. (And maybe not even then.) I could play the race card, but that’s not my point. Actually, I have two points. Gun control doesn’t make anyone safer—save criminals. And open carry does. [h/t to Allen V for the link]

It’s now illegal for Californians to openly carry an unloaded handgun in a public place. The new law does not apply to unloaded long guns. As TTAG predicted, open carry advocates are there. “A man showed up at a Daly City mall Monday with an unloaded shotgun strapped to his back – and he wasn’t arrested,” sfexaminer.com reports with hyphenated astonishment. “A security guard called police after spotting a man with a shotgun outside Serramonte Shopping Center about 9 a.m., before the mall opened for business, Daly City police Sgt. Michael Barton said. Responding cops located the man, but then released him after determining the shotgun was legally his and unloaded, Daly City police Sgt. Michael Barton said.”

On January first, California’s AB 144 kicks in. As the new year begins, the Golden State’s city, county and or state police may arrest anyone openly carrying a handgun. Unless the citizen in questions is a police officer (duh). Otherwise, a California citizen who wishes to exercise his or her Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms must carry concealed. Oh, and they must have a permit to carry—a document whose provision depends entirely on the whims of their local constabulary. Does this mean California’s Open Carry movement is doomed? That’s a loaded question . . .

Some say the end of open carry in California is a good thing, not a bad thing. Now that the “gun nuts” (a.k.a. “extremists”) have to put away their pistols, the state is more likely to get with the program re: concealed carry laws. It will be easier for gun rights advocates to argue that citizens living in Governor Moonbeam’s jurisdiction should have the same access to handguns for self-defense as, say, the majority of Americans. What left-leaning hoplophobes can’t see won’t hurt them (psychologically or electorally).

I doubt it. Keep in mind that the recently enacted law against open carry prohibits the public display of unloaded guns. (Openly carried loaded guns were already illegal.) In effect, the California legislature banned the idea of guns. That’s a bit silly. By the same token, openly carrying an unloaded handgun is a bit silly, too. Sure, an experienced operator can load their weapon quickly, but it’s a bit like downing a Viagra at a Glory Hole. Only the stakes are a lot higher.

Contra Costa Times columnist David Allen’s snarky coverage of a local town meeting highlights the ridiculousness—and ridicule—created by California’s twilighting [empty] open carry law:

An open-carry advocate said members of her group have run into trouble by carrying visible firearms into local businesses.

“We have been harassed by police, treated like common criminals,” Madison Jones told council members.

Jones, a blond, smartly dressed woman who was not packing heat at that moment, said 20 people wearing holstered handguns ate in a backroom at Vince’s Spaghetti last month.

That is, until “a swarm” of Ontario police burst in and told the group to take their weapons back to their cars or leave. They left.

Jones said she and her group carry weapons to “defend ourselves” and exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

“You mentioned `defending’ yourself. Are your guns loaded?” Councilman Jim Bowman asked.

When Jones said no, Bowman said: “So defending yourself isn’t an issue.”

Obviously not (/sarcasm). Bowman’s glib dismissal of his voters’ desire to defend their lives and the lives of their loved ones and the lives of their community members is par for the course in California. If you need further evidence (i.e. if you want to get your blood pressure up), check scribe Allen’s humorous take on the constitutional showdown at Vince’s Spaghetti:

Mayor Paul Leon tried to inject a note of levity regarding the restaurant choice and the Old West-style holsters.

“That’s the problem,” Leon said. “We don’t like spaghetti westerns.”

Jones and her two friends in the audience weren’t amused, causing Leon to assure them the matter would be looked into.

He could have carried the analogy further. Imagine if, during an open-carry meal, a Vince’s server trips and spills a plate of spaghetti on a male customer. The man rises in shock and staggers into the dining room, white shirt-front stained red, and gasps accusingly, “He got me.” That could be bad for business.

It’s beyond unfortunate that the U.S. Supreme Court’s McDonald decision didn’t affirm Americans’ right to bear—as in carry—arms. American gun rights may be ascendent, but some of this country’s most populous states remain vehemently anti-gun. Decades of legal, political and cultural struggle lay ahead.

Meanwhile, Californians can still openly carry unloaded long guns. Will the state’s open carry advocates start bringing unloaded shotguns and rifles to restaurants—just to make a point? Count on it. Is that a good idea? You tell me.

What are the odds that someone could walk into a Chicago police station holding a loaded AR, declare martial law and not be either repeatedly ventilated, billy-clubbed to a bloody pulp or even charged with a crime? Hold on. Hmm. Seems the Cray supercomputer in my basement can’t derive a number that astronomically high…

But that’s exactly what an unidentified man “who appeared to be a bit unstable” did on Thanksgiving. From suntimes.com:

The man entered the Harrison District police station at 3151 W. Harrison around 4 a.m., carrying an AR-15 assault rifle and a loaded 30-round magazine, police said. Police said the man told them he was declaring martial law, but he did not point the gun at anybody or fire it.

Officers immediately tried to calm the 28-year-old man and were able to disarm him without a struggle and defuse the rifle, police said.

Police said the rifle was in full view, and the man made no effort to conceal it when he walked into the station. The man, who “appeared to be a bit unstable,” told officers he found the rifle a few days ago after seeing someone throw it over a fence, police said.

Wonder if they called in the bomb squad to handle defusing that AR.

The man’s now resting comfortably in a hospital where he’s being “evaluated.” His first order of business once he’s sprung should probably be to buy a lottery ticket because he’s clearly one of the luckiest bastards in Chicago.

TTAG scribe and proto-hunter Nick Leghorn recently stirred-up a ballistic hornet’s nest—a metaphor I’d like to see in real life, from a distance—with his post SERPA Holsters Should be Discontinued. Nick argued that the popular holster is inherently unsafe. Note: he did not call for a ban. He said it should be discontinued. Personally, I’m down with that. I believe that all self-defense weaponry should be designed for the lowest common denominator. ‘Cause we’re ALL the lowest common denominator when the excrement hits the rotating air circulation device. To use the SERPA holster safely, you need a relatively high level of training AND enough opfam (Operational Familiarity) that you don’t Tex Grebner under pressure. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, there is a better alternative. As demonstrated here. All that said, you pays your money, you takes your chances.

Most gun guys are down with Robert A. Heinlein’s suggestion that “an armed society is a polite society.” They cite their experiences at the range, where everyone has a gun (or five) and shooters are unflaggingly polite to each other. Yes, well, most Americans don’t carry a gun and the majority of those that do carry concealed. While the percentage of the percentage who carry who are not polite is smaller still, two stories from last week got me thinking: the social crusader who subsidizes African disarmament (melting down AKs) and the guy who invaded the cigar store. Are highly armed African communities more polite because of their weapons and what would have happened if cigar man had been packing heat? What would happen if everyone had a gat? How much difference would it make if people carried open or concealed carry?

Thoughtful people of good will have differing opinions about the wisdom of openly carrying firearms. I leave that question for others to debate. Suffice it to say, Washington state does not prohibit open carry either by statute or case law. In theory, when an activity is not clearly illegal, the law should not punish people for doing it. In practice, Evergreen state prosecutors continue to push the limits of the law to beat back the scourge of informed, armed citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights.

That’s what happened to Kurk.

Never mind that Washington’s prohibition on open carry was repealed in 1999, making Washington an open carry state.

Never mind that Kurk was polite, cooperative and even friendly with the investigating officers.

Never mind that his chief accuser was a self-styled martial arts expert who’d been court-martialed out of the Marine Corps for selling drugs in the barracks.

Never mind that the other two accusers were the ex-Marine’s wife and friend.

Never mind that all the accusers initially said Kurk was doing nothing menacing or alarming at all.

Never mind that they waited nearly two weeks before they concocted a lurid tale of gun-slinging villainy that would have made Josey Wales choke on his tobacco spit.

Never mind that, of the hundreds of people in the shopping center that warm afternoon, only three other people even noticed that he was wearing a gun. (So much for the gun-slinging tomfoolery.)

And never mind that those three other people remembered Kurk as cheerful, polite and outgoing.

Never mind all that.Kurk was charged with ‘Unlawful Display of A Weapon’ because three people were frightened by the sight of a handgun.  You don’t have to do anything frightening with a handgun, apparently, to violate the law; some hoplophobes are frightened merely by seeing one.

It took hundreds of hours of investigation and research, enormous material assistance from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund and twenty months, but the charges against Kurk Kirby have been dismissed.

Yesterday afternoon I joined my client at the evidence department of the Vancouver Police Department to retrieve his pistol, the very same .45 ACP Springfield XD pictured above. He even got all his bullets back, and that’s a good thing because Cor-Bon .45s are damned expensive.

Kurk has a clean record. He’s got his gun back. By any yardstick, his open carry saga belongs in the win column.

His accuser doesn’t seem to have done so well: he took some blistering heat from the Open Carry crowd, and the last time we interviewed him his business had taken a nose-dive. I’d be dishonest if I said it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

And the other people who noticed him that day? Their story hasn’t gone so well either. Two of them were clerks at the tanning salon next to the accuser’s martial arts ‘dojo,’ and they were robbed earlier this year by a hooded meth tweaker who claimed to have a gun in his pocket. Nobody was hurt, but the scumbag has never been identified or caught.

Kurk wasn’t there that day, because I’d advised him to stay as far from the court-martialed ex-marine Karate Kid as possible until the case blew over. The clerks really wish he’d been there, because they doubt any tweaker would have robbed them if an athletic and conspicuously armed customer had been chatting with them in the lobby.

In the end, the city of Vancouver ‘protected’ itself from the (supposedly) palpitation-inducing sight of a man peaceably wearing a sidearm and minding his own business. I guess we’re all supposed to feel better about that.

The only thing I feel good about: my client (and now my friend) clearing his name and getting his gun back. Kurk’s a good guy, and a Springfield XD .45 is a damned nice gun.  All’s well that ends well.