“We haven’t gotten where are today by getting in people’s faces with openly displayed firearms on our hips, quite the opposite in fact.”
I disagree. We had open carry picnics in Arizona, because the State was illegally encroaching on our rights. We did not become the most gun friendly state in the union by meekly begging the old media now to demonize us.
The *only* case where open carry is claimed to have worked against us is in California, a state that has *no* state constitutional protection for the right to bear arms, because they wanted to have the power to disarm Mexicans and Chinese. Even there, when people openly carried unloaded guns, exercising their rights... The legislature passed an open carry ban. If that would not have happened, we would not have got the Peruta decision with the Ninth Circuit saying that you have a right to carry outside of your home.
They only came to that, because both open carry *and* concealed carry were being denied.
Open carry was crucial to getting shall issue laws passed in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.
As riverrunner said, if you do not use a right, you lose it.
“to now demonize” should be “to not demonize”
The old media can always find someone to make you out to be an “extremist” no matter how well you act.
It would be interesting to know, had the state not outlawed all open carry, whether the Peruta court might have found that UNLOADED open carry doesn't meet the requirements for the Second Amendment. Their decision might have been the same but was made simpler by the heavy-handedness of the legislature and governor, encouraged by liberal's with wet pants who were shocked to see people without uniforms carrying firearms.