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bdickens wrote: Imagine if the Sons of Liberty had said "we better not dump that tea in the harbor, it might disturb people and hurt our cause."

Yeah but in this case, it would be a similar thing if the guys taking guns to the rallies were:

1. breaking the law, openly
and
2. disguised as a known criminal element such as street gang members in order to avoid identification and prosecution

I agree with the civil rights arguments! I kind of think that if we really want to press the pro-gun-rights agenda, then we should be openly-carrying loaded long guns everywhere we go, and in fact submit to arrest in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy and corruption of the government. Maybe if enough people saw some regular folks innocuously carrying an SKS to a political event being arrested and put in jail when they broke no law on national TV then enough of the passive gun-rights advocates might wake up and become a little more active.

Liberty wrote:One thing that bothers me about these incidents is, I wonder how difficult open carriers make it for the secret service to do their job. It seems like everytime someone tries to shoot a president We lose our gun rights.

You are right about the losing our rights part, but I think the difficulty of the job of the secret service is irrelevant. The secret service must have more nuanced training than "if the guy is open-carrying a gun, he is a threat".

There will always be a throng of nut cases wanting to shoot the President, no matter who the President is. This has nothing to do with gun rights.

My problem with this whole debate is the idea that by carrying a gun, you are identifying yourself as a threat. The assumption by the media and maybe the regular general public is that if you have a gun, you must be planning to shoot somebody. So if you have a gun near the President, then you must be planning to shoot the President. The problem with this argument is the same old legal gun carrying argument, and that is that the bad guys, by definition, break the law. So just because you don't see the gun that the guy intent to shoot the President might have, does not mean there is no threat.

The presence of these guns is not any indicator whatsoever of a risk to the President. The President is at risk because he is a President conveying a controversial set of policies and presenting himself to the public for interaction, and this is the very nature of being the President in the first place. He's not at risk because some regular folks are carrying guns, any more than police open-carrying guns would put him at risk.

I would suggest there is just as much of a chance that a cop is going to flip out and shoot the President at one of these meetings as there is that one of these OC proponents is going to do the same.

that's right AFAIK. You can legally open-carry a fully loaded and operational long gun (rifle, shotgun).

Try this in Austin and I think you should expect to get arrested and be featured on the evening news as a nutcase but it's legal anyway.

Actually, you have the right to open-carry an AR15 or any other rifle, or a shotgun, in TX.

I wouldn't recommend it if you don't like being arrested, but it is legal.

Not so with a hand gun though.