Caleb over at Gun Nuts Media has stirred up the shooting community by posting a video of Rob Pincus and James “I put cameramen downrange during live fire exercises” Yeager bitching about open carry. Once again those who support open carry are debating against those who oppose it. Let me solve this debate.
Does the act of open carrying hurt anybody? I don’t mean some imaginary definition of hurt, like hurting a “cause” or somebody’s feeling, I mean actually physically hurting somebody. No? Then it’s not a problem, is it?
That’s it, the argument is over as far as I’m concerned. You can claim that people who openly carry a firearm are harming the cause of gun rights, but that’s really an irrelevant statement because those who oppose the right to carry a firearm are going to oppose it regardless. Their problem lies with the fact that they don’t like guns, they’re afraid of guns, and unless you get them beyond that point they’re going to oppose legalizing the carrying of firearms. Getting people beyond their fear of firearms requires normalizing firearms in their eyes. Instead of the magic black boxes that are capable of dealing death we must introduce opponents of gun rights to the fact that firearms are machines, no different than automobiles. We must demonstrate that firearms aren’t evil, they have no consciousness, they are merely tools in the hands of people.
Fighting amongst each other isn’t going to help promote gun rights, in fact I bet that fighting amongst each other does far more harm to gun rights than any act of openly carrying firearms could ever manage. Seeing proponents of gun rights fighting with one another causes outsiders to question our ideals even more.
Well said!