Glock 'em down said:Let me start by saying, yes I am a LEO and I support the 2nd Amendment 110%.
Do I support open carry? No. Let me tell you why.
It has absolutely nothing to do about the wild, wild west. It has to do with basically two things. Public safety and the element of surprise.
There are many gun owners who read all the gun rags and hang out at gun shops and fondle every gun out there before they buy one. Which is good. Research is vital.
However. Simply owning a gun doesn't mean you know how to use it properly. Just like owning a guitar does NOT make you a musician.
A lot of people don't use good judgement when picking out the proper gear for their CC package. They may buy the very best pistol on the market, but they will skimp on a proper holster, belt and mag pouch.
You DO carry a spare mag...don't you?
Anyway...back to my point(s).
Open carry invites more crime. When a properly licensed, CCW holder, with his gun on his hip is standing in line at the local grocery store, Wal-Mart, wherever, he/she poses a potential threat to those around them simply because they aren't focused on their weapon but rather everything having to do with their transaction at the register. This gives a bad guy a perfect opportunity to disarm the citizen and perform illegal activities.
And don't think I'm just picking on the citizens out there. Hell, I've seen other cops that forget all about their pistola on their hip and practically hand it to a bad guy. I laugh at dispatchers that give us a call of a domestic in progress followed by a "no weapons involved" statement. The minute I arrive there WILL be a weapon involved - mine! There is a gun at every call I go to - mine!
The next point I want to share is the element of surprise.
The bad guys out there have plenty of information about you. Thanks to Google and the internet, if a bad guy wants to study you and learn about you, he'll know you better than you know yourself. And while you're standing in line at the grocery store, Wal-Mart, wherever, do you really want him to know that you are armed? Guess who his first target is gonna be?
If you keep your iron hidden then you have a shred of hope against an attack. The element of surprise. If you say to him, "here's my gun" he's gonna do everything in his power to take it away from you, giving him complete control of the situation. Then, you are no longer a citizen, but a statistic.
As a cop, I hate going to Wal-Mart or someplace while I am in uniform because I'm as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Because even though I've been thru more firearms training than the average Joe, I too am not immune from an attempted gun grab and I have the same limited view as everybody else.
Bad guys thrive on bad things. That's who/what they are. Nobody can check their six constantly. When a bad guy sees your gun, he knows that he has to take you out first so he can have the upper hand. He can (and will) attack you and disarm you because he has already set his sights on you without your knowledge of him doing so.
Now I can ramble on and on and I know I'm gonna catch hell for what I've just said, but...that's just my take on open carry.
And for the record...you see all these off duty cops with their gun on their hip and a shild clipped next to it? That's just as bad IMO as the citizen carrying openly. When I'm off duty, you won't see ANYTHING on or about my person that says "cop."
But yeah, if'n I'm vertical, I'm armed.
Very very well said.
Its a simple matter of only wanting to use the portions of the Constitution one agrees with. While I agree with GED that there are many downsides with open carry I am willing to accept them. To do otherwise is to make a mockery of the Constitution.
Isn't this the case in Oklahoma too when transporting a weapon?
