An Open-Carry Guy popped up in my neighborhood the other day–a white guy walking with his lady, a black 9mm or .45 automatic in a drop-leg holster on his right. As it happened I was in a rush with my kids, so I didn’t stop to talk. Just to put it in context: I live in a strictly residential area, within a 10 minute walk of four schools, three houses of worship, a major commuter corridor, a bustling business district, at least three daycare centers, and this guy and his gal were walking along the edge of an apartment complex that’s home to the counties densest population of Asian immigrant families.
I’m a gun owner, and I fully respect his constitutional right to own basically whatever gun he chooses. I respect the CCW system as it works here in Michigan, and haven’t had a beef with CCW holders to date. I *don’t* believe that there is a constitutional right to openly transport guns in whatever manner one chooses, and have to say that, thus far, the law is with me in Michigan (for example, although any adult can open-carry on foot, you cannot open-carry in a motor vehicle without a CCW).
While I respect his rights, I don’t respect the judgement he was showing, and the tremendous insensitivity to the community (which is full of schools, children, and families). That this encounter came just a couple weeks after folks online were cheering my and my family’s ultimate death–and just as shit is once again heating up in Israel–didn’t help.
At any rate, I’d already been mulling over this piece about the appropriate response to meeting Open Carry Guys, and had been interested in this suggestion:
PQED: How should people respond to open-carry gun-rights activists?
But here is the key part: don’t pay. Stopping to pay in the presence of a person with a gun means risking your and your loved ones’ lives; money shouldn’t trump this. It doesn’t matter if you ate the meal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just received food from the deli counter that can’t be resold. It doesn’t matter if you just got a haircut. Leave. If the business loses money, so be it. They can make the activists pay.
That said, I’d like to make an additional suggestion–one for situations like mine, where you happen across someone inappropriately armed in a non-commercial setting:
1) There is a fine line between “carrying” and “brandishing.” For example here, in Ann Arbor, MI, if this guy had unholstered for *any* reason (other than surrendering the weapon to an officer, I suppose), the police would write him up for brandishing. Likewise, I’m under the impression that openly carrying a long gun in any manner (apart from cased–which isn’t “open carrying” anyway–or in a scabbard) is likely to fall under brandishing. Would these charges stick? Frankly, that’s for the courts to sort out.
2) If you are frightened by a person’s public behavior, you are frightened. That is an issue for law enforcement to address. Just for comparison, if someone was out in the street *screaming* at his or her kid or partner, you’d likely also call the police, because you’d be frightened, and because addressing frightening situations for citizens is what we have police for.
In the end, the most important thing is this: Open Carry Guys aren’t openly carrying because they happen to be hunting, and that’s how hunting works. They aren’t Open Carrying because they are on the job (like a security guard or armed-car driver) and their job requires they be armed. They are openly carrying in order to make a political statement about a foggy area of the law. Our job, as citizens, is to clear that fog. It gets cleared by the courts, and that means folks getting arrested, having their day, and duking it out. As responsible citizens, it’s quite arguably our *responsibility* to usher these activists into the system so that they can move their issue forward and we can all live under a clear and reasonable set of legal expectations for public behavior.