Don't display a gun for show, unless the situation may reasonably require it's use.
Anything anything else and you WILL LOSE every thing you own or will own. It WILL destroy your future.
Ask a Lawyer.
DK
Seems like you are fundamentally against open carry. Now I would have ignored the loud kids unless they became a threat to me. But it is pretty clear they were on the way to becoming a threat, when the gun on his belt stopped them well short of that.
You say there SHOULD be a rule against open carry in these kinds of situations. I HOPE you are aware how impractical that would be.
Everybody modifies their behavior around people who are armed. That includes police, the potentially thuggish, and just us normal people. Most people think it is a change for the better.
Telling Joe to be more discreet or tolerant is fine. Making this an argument against open carry is ridiculous.
I haven't seen DK make that argument at all. In his story, and his title, Joe indicated that he used his gun to quiet a table of loud laughers. By his own account, it was the gun that quieted them. By his own account, he circled the table twice. We may be jumping to a conclusion here, but I think he pretty strongly implied that the purpose of his circling was to show his hardware to the laughing people. We can split hairs all we want about whether, under Montana law this was "brandishing," but the bottom line is that (again, by Joe's own account) he used a gun to enforce - what? Manners? That's more than a little bit crazy, whether or not the legal consequences would be as severe as some have suggested (although I think they very well could be.)
You don't threaten (and, please, let's stop pretending that deliberately showing your gun is not at least an implied threat) with a gun unless you are going to use it. I just don't think there is any way on earth Joe would have shot those kids if they'd kept on laughing loudly - even if they were laughing at him. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a debate about RKBA - it's about simple, adult, good judgment.
Seems like you are fundamentally against open carry. Now I would have ignored the loud kids unless they became a threat to me. But it is pretty clear they were on the way to becoming a threat, when the gun on his belt stopped them well short of that.<<
The kids never left their table. If you chose as a citizen to confront them on their noise at a restaurant and ended up shooting one, your life would as a nice happy person would end. What don't you get about this? It's not about carrying rules, or cops. You will be judged by twelve jurors and afterward sued for millions.
Your solution, Jeez, I could not fathom it. Kids at a table are a threat...Don't go to a court with that. You will lose miserably. And no one will understand what part of this is hard to understand.
DK