DEB wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2019 5:50 pm
I think many of us gun carriers are our worst enemies. Go open carrying within a store, drink a soda you haven't paid for and start questioning the store's practices, by making a nuisance of one's self. Offer to pay for the soda you filched as well as the goods you have in your cart all the while filming your interaction with the store and Law Enforcement. I don't know, not really the ambassador for good will there, I might opinion. Have a highly publicized active shooting in a Walmart in El Paso and just looking to keep poking the bear and then complain? Just like that boy in Missouri. I know no Laws were broken, except for maybe that soda he pilfered, same as the boy who put on a vest and carried that AR 15 at the low ready. I ain't sayin keep quite and don't fight back, but why poke the bear? In good old California one could open carry as long as one didn't have a bullet in the pipe. Next thing you know, here comes the internet and everyone is filming them arguing with the Police, now California is one step from Venezuela. Just sayin...
I agree that the guy who carried an AR
and an open carried pistol
while wearing a plate carrier with a bunch of spare AR mags in it into a Walmart just days after the El Paso shooting is a
MORON. It was completely socially tone deaf, and makes me wonder if the dude isn’t autistic. I don’t blame the retired firefighter who stuck a gun in his ear for doing what he did. It may well have been that the "gunman" meant no harm, but it didn’t
LOOK that way.
That said, and absent any video record or other information saying otherwise, that wasn’t THIS dude's case. The guy in this video was dressed in "redneck casual" (not a real problem....it’s how
I dress a lot of the time), but he had his gun in a cheap holster, not very securely clipped to the waist of his pants without the support of even a cheap belt. This isn’t a legal definition, but let’s just say that it was "unprofessional" looking—for lack of a better term. I wonder if the outcome would have been different if he had his gun in a better holster, actually anchored to a belt, and if he’d just kept his mouth shut and not tried to "educate" the store manager—which too often probably comes off as an obnoxious superiority attitude.
We'll never know, but it makes for some interesting speculation. All I know is that if I keep a low profile, stay out of other people's way who are trying to do their jobs, and carry my weapon like I actually have my act together, it’s probably going to draw less attention with less of a chance of getting trespassed out of a place that is useful to me once in a while.
Even so, the cops were out of line by forcing him to sign a Walmart generated form. I’d have refused.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
