Open Carry: Threat or Menace?

This is hard to watch, as there’s stupidity all around, but I do think it’s instructive.

I’m not a big fan of open carry, mind you, but I know that some folks are. While, on balance, I prefer to be discreet, as I think there’s real disadvantages to open carry, most times, most places, there are some arguments in favor of it.

1. Bad people — well, bad people without badges — tend to avoid hassling people with guns visible. When was the last time you heard about a cop with a gun visible on his hip getting mugged or being picked out for a carjacking?

2. A right not seen to be exercised tends to go away, whether it’s protesting at city hall or keeping and bearing arms. In MN and PA — and many, many other states — we don’t have a concealment requirement.

3. It’s a good thing, on balance, for folks who aren’t into the whole carrying guns in public thing to see, say, an African American educator, like the woman at right, or a web designer in his mid-thirties out grocery shopping with his cute little kids while carrying; helps to dispel the notion that it’s just soft, middle-aged lonely guys who get carry permits.

Not my thing, mind you, but there are folks who are into it. Like, say, Meleanie Hain.

She’s a thirtyish Soccer Mom in Lebanon PA who, at her young kid’s soccer games — and everywhere she goes — she openly carries a Glock in a good security holster on her hip.

Other folks freak. But there’s nothing much they can — or, for that matter, should — do about it, as she has a carry permit, which in PA allows her to carry either openly or concealed; without it, she’d have to carry openly.

The sheriff, deciding that her carrying openly shows that she’s dangerous, yanks her carry permit, which prohibits her from carrying discreetly, which she doesn’t want to, anyway; she can carry openly without the permit.

Yup. To punish her for carrying her gun openly, he took away the permit that allows her to carry it discreetly, forcing her to carry openly, if she chooses to carry.

I don’t make this stuff up, you know.

She heads to court; judge gives her the permit back, along with a lecture about how what she’s doing is legal, it’s also wrong, wrong, wrong; she can now carry openly, or concealed.

Much hysteria continues to ensue.

Hence the show, where a whole variety of people with strong opinions and little information on the issues around this assemble to argue about them. I’m glad it locks up with nine minutes to go; I don’t think I could have taken any more.

Largely, it’s folks arguing about hypotheticals. In terms of what’s actually happened, well, not much; there’s not all that much to discuss. She hasn’t taken the gun out in public, because, well, she hasn’t had to; she also hasn’t rested her hand on the butt of the gun while asking a ref to reconsider a call, or the coach to put her kid in more, or anything like that, either, which isn’t surprising. Some local soccer moms apparently feel that they’ll be safe if they insist she stand across the field from them; they think she’ll shoot them, but don’t know that bullets can easily travel a couple of dozen feet.

But the best stupid hypothetical is put forward by one Sean Burke, a Massachusetts cop, Steve Rogers, a New Jersey cop. (Yes, there’s a correction there; I copied the name from the web page, not the video. I’m very sad; I was always a great admirer of Captain America…)

Now, since Massachusetts has one of the most restrictive carry permit laws in the country — only IL and WI are worse; NJ and NY are just about as bad — naturally, Burke Rogers knows everything to know there is about how things work in states, like PA, which have modern, mainstream, commonsense shall issue carry permit laws.

Not because he has any experience with it, or has thought much or read anything about it, but because, well, he’s got a badge and good hair.

He explains the problem: in a situation where, say, she’d taken her gun out to stop from being murdered or something, she runs a great danger of being shot by twelve — he’s sure it’s twelve — well-armed SWAT cops, who won’t know who the bad guy is, but will blast away at the soccer Mom.

Yup. Let’s explore that. It’s not likely that she’ll need to take her handgun out at her kid’s soccer game, of course; it it was likely, she’d just not take the kid to the soccer game.

But let’s create a hypothetical, and think it through: some machete-wielding ax murderer shows up, and after quickly chopping up another soccer mom and kid or two, starts to move toward her. He’s running faster than she can, so out comes the Glock, and instead of her having to shoot him — honest; I’m stacking the cards against her; trust me — he puts the machete down and lies down at the ground, where she covers him with her Glock while waiting for the local SWAT team to arrive.

Now, I don’t know much about the Lebanon PA SWAT team, but let’s make them a hell-for-leather bunch, who manage to get there in ten, fifteen minutes. And when they see the vaguely chubby soccer mom holding a gun on the guy lying on the ground near the machete — perhaps fairly close to the chopped up parts of his previous victims — they’ll shoot her.

That’s Officer Burke’s worry. I don’t make this stuff up, you know. Yes, that’s his objection. In a situation where she’s used her gun to prevent being killed, she might get shot by a bunch of cops.

He’s just looking out for her.