I find it odd that law enforcement officials don’t support the idea of open carry. If I were snorting—I mean patrolling the thin blue line, my firearm fear would focus on concealed carry. To paraphrase the British expression about death by bus (again), it’s the gun you don’t see that kills you. I wonder how much of the cops’ opposition to open carry is about maintaining the power to license guns, and how much of it is childhood exposure to gunfighting movies. A lot apparently . . .
Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott, sharing the opinion of the vast majority of the state’s sheriffs, stated, “Allowing people to carry pistols in their holsters, like the old Wild West days, is dead wrong. It will result in more shootings and make our deputies’ job more difficult and more dangerous”. The sheriff, reacting to a recent school board shooting in Florida, lamented the fact that, “The time is not far away when all our public meetings will require metal detectors and armed guards to protect officials from a mentally unbalanced individual with a gun.”
Guns on trochanters! Guns on trochanters! Great Scott! What’s a trochanter? Will open carry advocates take us back to the future to create gunfights in the streets, as the citizen-times.com’s editorialist (clamoring for Canadian gun laws in the Land of the Free) suggests? Or will open carry help police and reduce crime, in that Robert Heinlein “an armed society is a polite society” kinda way?
I’m a strong believer in open carry. I reckon it would extend and defend our second amendment rights by the process of normalization (nothing to do with Psycho). Although school shooters are as rare as gold hen’s teeth, open carry would certainly diminish that problem. What’s your take?