MeMelYup wrote:How a person carries a firearm should not be a concern of the general population and should not be mandated by law. What happens if the person somehow injures another person should be of concern to the people and can be mandated by law.
If I have a firearm in my pocket and "ACCIDENTALLY" shoot someone when I stick my hand into my pocket, I am and should be held fully accountable for the alleged "ACCIDENT." There should be mandated repercussions for my stupidity. There should be mandated repercussions for the degree of injury that I have caused. There should be nothing mandating I have to have it in a certain style holster, that should be "common sense" from training and logic.
I think this is where society and lawmakers go wrong. They want to penalize an item and the people that own that item instead of penalizing the act that was commited using the item.
I'm not suggesting it
should be mandated by law or that we should be penalized for the actions of others. But with regard to the opening post in this thread, I'm just suggesting that we have a choice between creating good will or destroying it, and how we choose to carry will have a strong influence on how we are perceived. It really doesn't matter how WE perceive what we do, if the goal is to make NON-gun owners/carriers comfortable around us when we OC. What matters is how THEY perceive us.
There is a cadre of malcontents who are never going to be happy until they've stomped out every last flame of fun around them. You can't please those folks. They'll never be happy until only government has guns, and they won't mind it if millions of citizens are killed resisting confiscation, because you have to break an egg to make an omelet. The very fact you or I carry, even concealed, is an affront to them. I don't really care about such people, because the only thing that would ever change their mind is to find them
selves in a situation where only a gun in their hands can save them, and to not have one.....which means they get eliminated from the gene pool. We'll have the satisfaction of knowing that such a person might experience seconds or minutes of terrified regret at their own stupidity, and then they'll be gone. Tough beans, but oh well.
But I believe that the vast majority of non-gun people are somewhere in the middle ground, and we can make them into allies or enemies—OUR choice. I used to joke that my wife's job title for our business is "Director of First Impressions"....... and that's about as accurate as it gets if we are to be advance ambassadors for OC once it passes. We can either fulfill their prejudices, or we can present a "normal" (but for the presence of the gun) front.
That's why I suggest that toning things down a bit can go a long way to converting doubters into allies. I'm not saying don't OC the gun. I'm saying make it look non-threatening to the uninitiated.
