Hey Lonnie,
I'm a little confused on whether we are agreeing here or not
My position is that you should be able to carry open or concealed, loaded or unloaded, or none of the above at your choice without needing anyone's permission or license.
That's my personal policy choice. I'm a supporter of Alaska-style concealed carry and "gold star" open carry.
As a notion of etiquette, I make an econometric observation that if you carry openly you increase the risk of everyone around you to being attacked by the bad guy cos he's not going to tackle you!
I don't agree with that statement. I might also add that I myself have a Washington State CPL and licenses from several states.
So if people start carrying openly I have to start carrying openly to level the playing field.
There's nothing that says that you HAVE to open carry. You're putting the choice on me, the open carrier, to make me responsible for someone's criminal acts against others.
Contrarily, if some small percentage of people carry concealed, or even if they don't but the law says they can, then everyone, whether they carry or not, is made safer because the bad guy doesn't know who is or who isn't so he backs off, maybe finds another way of making money which isn't so risky to him.
Well, again, concealed carry only doesn't really do that. Criminals are generally stupid, and unless a state passes a shall-issue law with a TREMENDOUS amount of media attention, such as Florida back in 1987, there isn't a huge drop in crime.
So, my position is that no a priori restrictions/licensing etc on people carrying concealed as the public law position makes us all safer and should be desired by even soccer mums who would never carry. If we can educate the nongunny public to this argument I think we could get a positive view of guns adopted by a wider group.
Well, that's the issue, though. It's hard to strike up conversation with a concealed carrier because you generally won't know. Because of my open carrying, I was able to convince dozens of people to apply for their carry permits, some of them from California who moved up here and who didn't even realize that it was legal to carry at all up here (it just wasn't in their experience).
But I'm not going to pass a law which says you shouldn't carry open, I'd just have a lower opinion of someone who does as being rude and uncaring of their neighbors and community (in my ideal community where civic minded people occassionally carry just to keep the bad guys guessing)
You see, my reasons for open carry in Washington would be different from my reasons for open carry down in California. Different situations, different rules. As a Washington resident, I cannot apply for a license in ANY county at all in California, even though I visit frequently.
Now, I think what your saying is that long term you have no problem with my position, it may even be yours but for short term tactical reasons, you want CCW to be continued to be perceived by the wider public as somehow "unwholesome" something to be restricted and licensed, however liberally, and you'll get people to begrudgingly accept that CCW stance because you push a totally unacceptable open carry right in their faces by means of court cases. Did I get that right? It doesn't seem right but I couldn't read your post any other way. Help me out here, I'm not trying to be offensive.
Look, I'm not the one who put in about 200 years of constitutional law on carry. It was the state and federal courts that did that. They were the ones that viewed "bearing arms" as open carry.
Insofar as CCW, I don't want CCW generally to be considered unwholesome. I want may-issue concealed carry, with the racial discrimination issues and equal protection violations, to be considered unwholesome.
Now I know other gunnies who also have a view of CCW, that its not honorable, that good, true, men shouldn't do it, that everyone being armed is the way to go. Is that your position?
Again, I'm not the one that put in the 200 years of court cases that declared it so. Now, just to turn a phrase, I've had a LOT, and I mean, a lot of the "concealed carry only" crowd repeatedly disparage me, the open carry community, and so on, saying that what WE were doing was completely unwholesome, and so on. The biggest believers I've seen of that mindset was in California, especially centered around Orange County.
Go figure that I hear in the news that Sheriff Hutchens (the new sheriff after Mike Carona got hit with a federal corruption indictment) is just going to do it the Sheriff Brad Gates way, refuse to renew CCW's, and just not issue to normal people anymore, those same people that were downing me for open carrying anywhere in this country, with their "I've got my CCW so ha ha", now are going to find themselves defenseless in less than a year. Schaudenfruede is a treat nonetheless.
The other approach I'm aware of is that open unloaded carry being legal in many places if enough people do it, people get more comfortable with guns and over time we can proceed to free choice of open/concealed, loaded/unloaded, gun/no gun, live and let live, dogs and cats living together, etc. Is that where you are coming from?
Generally.
I'm not asking to be confrontational, I'm trying to understand the mix of views out there because we need to build a coalition to get numbers. If your going to vote down my proposal which you 90% support but you have a position on the other 10% then I need to know how to address that.
You're right, the coalition is being built and has been built up over at CalGuns.net. We have a hell of a fight on our hands, we're finally on the offensive in federal court, and the next 2 years are going to be the very key linchpin of that victory. We need a beachhead, a line that the state cannot cross no matter how entrenched the anti-gun forces are in California and how much their state court system reinterprets things.
Right now, out of 36 million people, there are 35,000 CCW holders. That is WAY too few people. I'd feel a lot better if there were 1 or 2 million CCW holders, which would be around the percentage that would be normal for the surrounding states (such as Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington).
I don't see how I can convince large numbers of people with no exposure or experience with guns to see their presence in society as a net good with arguments which smell to them as tactical moves to secure narrow interests. Open carry per se I don't see them buying, open carry as a ruse to get CCW will make them feel abused/tricked. An argument that a CCW permissive law in and of itself, without them changing their habits or ownership of guns makes them safer could fly. I'm not saying its an easy argument, it requires logic and the ability to see the obvious and the non-obvious and weigh both, etc.
That's because in California, the audience for open carry isn't really the general public, it's going to be the sheriff's and police chiefs that literally played god over people's applications, deciding who lives and who dies, for the last 80 years. This is their fault for causing this mess, and it's the Legislature's fault for allowing it to continue. If San Francisco and the bay area counties, Sacramento, and LA/Ventura/San Diego Counties freely issued licenses, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
If they feel tricked, I really don't care. They should start asking their sheriffs why they didn't issue licenses to battered women, gay men who have been targeted for bashings, and so on, to not even cause this in the first place.
