It seems the antigunners and the left are right. The citizenry is not responsible enough to carry arms.
Rants and sarcasm aside, from a purely practical perspective, a gun shop that has accumulated a number of bullet holes in the lobby is more than entitled to observe accurately that ENOUGH of the people who have come into their shop were not responsible enough to carry loaded weapons and use that as reasonable justification for a policy designed to prevent additional holes from being shot in the walls.
It's their shop after all--their walls, potentially their hides and their customers' hides that might be the next location to develop an unwanted bullet hole. Who are we to tell them that their tolerance for people accidentally shooting in their place of business is much too low and that makes them hypocrites?
If we are not responsible enough to carry at gun shows and gun shops, why are we responsible enough to carry anywhere ekse?
When people are at McDonalds, they aren't tempted to whip out their loaded carry gun and do a little show and tell for the person taking their fries order or for the person at the next table--I know I've never seen anything like that. At the gun shop or gun show, things are different--I know I HAVE seen customers use their carry guns for show and tell in that environment.
People don't typically bring guns to McDonalds for warranty repair, to trade them in, or to have the staff service them and that dramatically cuts down on the potential for someone cranking off a round at McDonalds while they are demonstrating to the manager why their rifle won't shoot right any more. On the other hand, it's pretty common for customers to return firearms to gun shops for service or replacement, and some of those are definitely brought in loaded.
At a gun show, there are hundreds of people handling firearms at any given moment. Over the course of a three day show, literally thousands of people will handle firearms. Over the course of an entire year at all the McDonalds in a large city, the number of people who will be handling a firearm in one of those facilities is tiny. The probability of someone firing a negligent shot at a gun show, even though it's full of mostly responsible people is fairly significant because there are so many people there, all engaging in potentially risky activity (risky from the perspective of negligent discharges). The probability of an ND at a McDonalds is obviously tremendously smaller than the probability of an ND at a gun show even if the percentage of irresponsible people is the same at both locations.
I think that it's important to keep a reasonable perspective. Pretending that an environment like a restaurant, or a Wal-Mart, or a movie theater is identical, from the perspective of the risk of negligent discharges, when compared to gun shows or gun shops is absolutely ridiculous.
I don't like it when gun shops or gun shows restrict carry or loaded guns on the premises. But the bottom line is that after a business owner or gun show organizer has the PROOF in the form of bullet holes and past NDs that the risk of someone popping off a round negligently in that environment is unacceptably high, how can we
reasonably complain that they shouldn't try to reduce that risk by implementing no carry policies?
