>>>>>Mark Milton,
Although I probably shouldn't, I find most of your post a bit offensive, even if it's intended to be given as advice.
For one, have you ever open carried in public? If not, then giving advice seems a bit out of place.
Second. where are you from? Open carry is pretty well accepted in many areas. Making a statement like:
Now, I've been carrying mostly openly for most of my life. I've open carried in grocery stores, hardware stores, insurance businesses, and just about anywhere you can imagine where carry is legal (which is most places here). I've carried concealed in those same places (yes, I keep a valid CCW permit), and also into banks and such.
If you doubt what I say, then come to SE Arizona some time.
Daryl<<<<
Daryl, my comments are based on reality and experience, not wishful thinking.
• And yes I HAVE been pulled over and harrassed by rookies over open carry. To wit, I was wearing a model 29 in a shoulder rig when I came back from an excersion in the woods and the next thing I know this young kid is trying to arrest me for brandishing a weapon. He called an older deputy who knew me and the older deputy told him,"It ain't brandishing a weapon if its sitting in the holster."
• I live in rural Appalachia and work in West Virginai five days a week and go home to Kentucky usually two days a week. This is very rural area across the Tug River I might add, and West Virginia is pretty pro-gun. Its not uncommon for government employees to talk about gun swapping and trading during the middle of a county commission meeting where I live and work.
Yet open carry is increasingly more and more rare. Sign of the times. As Marshall MacCluhan said the world is becoming a global villiage and part of that corporate McSheeple mono-culture is that the McSheeple have been brainwashed into thinking anybody with a gun is a bad guy.
Nobody in the media is pointing out that the armed citizen is usually more like Shane than the Jack Palance character.
Last week, there were three people open carrying downtown, but it was part of a "crime victims week" thing, where local gun owners decided to put an exclamation point on thier support.
Other than that, I have not seen many people open carrying in the past 15 years or so, and those who do are usually even older than I am. One 80 year old man who used to be a constable or deputy when I was a small kid open carries his old blue revolver and I sometimes see him at the post office with it.
In the town where I work I sometimes see a guy who open carries, but he wears a dress shirt and tie and because he has the high and tight haircut and is clean shaven people often assume he is an off duty or plain clothes cop.
Thats where I got the idea of the badge thing which I always thought was worthless, because he has one clipped to his belt. Most of the cops around here don't care, because he works for a living and is no trouble and his wife works at the gunshop where most of them get ammo and holsters and supplies.
I saw him getting by without being harrassed, which made me think that might be the route to take for those of you who would prefer open carry.
Like I said, I HAVE open carried when I was young and figured it wasn't worth the hassle. Back then, BEFORE the CCW laws were passed, I carried a $100 bill with me becuase if you got caught carrying concealed it was a misdemeanor with a $100 fine. I figured that was preferable than being hassled by rookies. When House Bill 40 passed I was one of the first people in the state to get my permit.
I can think of about a half a dozen arrests over the last few years in WV and Kentucky where I am from where people open carrying got arrested wrongfully by novices after a rookie saw them and panicked or after a panicking pilgrim called 911 with a "man with a gun" call.
My dad was a cop in the 70s, by the way and one of my best friends was a cop when I was a young man and I did a LOT of police ride alongs over the years and have been to some of those calls myself, where my dad or my buddy had to call the dispatcher back and explain, "nothing illegal going on, just a man wearing a gun, or a man bringing his gun back from the gunsmith," etc...
And for the record, Bro, my Uncle lived in Arizona back in the 1950s and we discussed open carry often when I was a teenager in the 1970s. He said it was common there and that people didn't get bent out of shape over it the way they do here.
If you are offended by reality, you need to be angry at reality, not the person who points it out to you. I am a pretty intelligent person and the only thing that I find offensive is ignorance and censorship.
*
:barf:
umm, that didn't sound quite right.