Charles L. Cotton wrote:
Although you and I don't agree on the impact open-carry would likely have in Texas, I do appreciate your reasoned approach to the subject. Until today, I hadn't read OpenCarry.com in months and I see nothing has changed.
If cases following Heller hold that the Constitution protects a right to carry a self-defense handgun (I believe it does), then I think the question is not whether either open-carry and/or concealed-carry are protected. I think the question the Court will address is whether licensing is required. I don't think the Court is going to say that one method (open-carry) of carrying a handgun is protected while another (concealed-carry) method is not. I know the language in Heller that is cited for this proposition, but people are reading far too much into this dicta.
And don't read too much into this statement, but I think Heller's recognition of a pre-constitutional right of self-defense, coupled with McDonald's applying this right to the states, is the foundation on which a well-written open-carry bill can be based. I think it provides the perfect context to do so, but not until a future case deals with "bearing" (i.e. carrying) a handgun, not "keeping" a handgun as was the issue in Heller. Regardless when the time is right, a successful open-carry campaign must be preceded with an educational effort to prepare the public so that we don't see the same knee-jerk reaction we say from 1995 to Sept. 1, 1997.
Chas.
If you read the threads concerning you/TexasCHLForum.com/TSRA you know that I'm still encourgaging people to join and contribute their voices to the discussion.
I appreciate the fact that you appear to be thinking and planning for the eventual coming of OC in Texas. I want to renew my offer to work with you and assist in any way that I can.
I agree with you that licensing will definitely be addressed at some point. I suspect it will be addressed multiple times and in reverse order of the difficulty of getting a license. For example, NY, CA, HI, MD "may issue" licensing will probably be challenged first because many of these jurisdictions, as a practical matter, do not issue at all. They will probably not pass muster.
More importantly, which other BoR provisions are subject to licensing and to vastly different licensing depending on where you are in the country? If the Court were to allow licensing -- with different requirements -- to exercise the basic right of gun carry, whether openly or concealed, the only similar thing that I can think of was the standard for pornography (where community-based standards rather than a one-size-fits-all approach was taken). Even in this context, that "community standards" approach seems to have been discarded either formally or informally and we now seem to have a defacto national standard for whether something is obscene or not. I certainly hope that the Court takes more of a traditional 1A (religion, press, association) approach and announces a nationwide standard -- this is absolutely protected, from here on states and localities can regulate.
The dicta in Heller isn't the only thing that makes folks think that there may be a CC/OC difference. The fact that so many states simply don't regulate OC (or cannot based on the state constitution) yet nearly all of them regulate CC might be a factor. Nullifying OC restrictions based on the 2A would affect many fewer existing laws than striking down all CC regulatory schemes. Please don't misunderstand: I've love for both CC and OC to constitutionally protected and immune from infringement. I'm simply saying that I can see very credible arguments that might make the court draw a line between the two.
SA-TX
We hoped that eventually it would do some good in the state but it just didn't work, it is slowly improving however.
