Personally I don’t open carry (even when permitted by law), but I get why some people choose to do so. In their opinion it normalizes guns, turns them from foreign objects to commonly encountered and “normal” accoutrements. I admit that there’s some validity to that strategy, but it only works if you also use the “killing them with kindness” approach. For one unidentified Georgia resident, the urge to be a douchebag took over and probably did more harm than good. [WARNING: Auto-play below] . . .
From the local news article:
Parents at a Forysth County park abruptly stopped a children’s baseball game after growing suspicions of the behavior of a man carrying a gun in a waist holster Tuesday night.
“He’s just walking around [saying] ‘See my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing,” said parent Karen Rabb.
Rabb told Channel 2’s Tom Regan the parents grew so alarmed that they brought the game to a halt when the man declined a request that he leave a parking lot overlooking the baseball field.
“He scared people to the point where we stopped the game, took the kids out of the dugout and behind the dugout, and kind of hunkered down,” Rabb said.
The issue here isn’t that he was carrying a gun — the issue was the manner in which he was doing it. Instead of simply being a pleasant person, showing the crowds that there was nothing to fear from the people of the gun, he decided to make a big deal out of packing and make people uncomfortable.
I don’t think the parents would have been nervous had he just had the gun in his holster and was just watching the game.
The last thing you ever want to do is go out of your way to make people nervous when you’re already doing something that not everyone will be comfortable with. Going out of your way to point it out and be a douchebag isn’t going to win them to your side.
The level of douchebaggery on display here is so flagrant that I’m almost tempted to fold up a tin foil hat and call this a false flag operation. The very weekend after a law that Michael Bloomberg opposes becomes law, someone decides that this is the perfect opportunity to stick out their metaphorical tongue and blow raspberries at normal every-day folks? It sounds more like a PR stunt from the Moms Demand Action folks than something a gun rights supporter would actually do.
Either way, people like this Georgia man give gun rights supporters a bad name. We win when people realize that we’re just normal folks and not bloodthirsty mental patients. This isn’t helping.