Well, if only you could make everyone’s personal decisions for them then the world would be correct.
You’ve got real problems with people being able to make their own choices, and I base that on what you wrote in your last response. The fact that you consider a person who is exercising both a federally-protected and state-protected constitutional right to be armed, to be irrational and paranoid, tells me you are not a pro-2nd amendment person, and that the right to self defense is a foreign concept to you.
The fact you fail to understand that if a person has a right, they don’t have to explain it or justify it or ask permission of anyone else to exercise it. If someone attacks me I don’t need permission to defend myself. If I want to carry a weapon for self protection I don’t need to justify it with anybody else, because I have a right to do so.
How would you like to have to explain and justify to a police officer, why you are going to church?
How would you like to HAVE to explain to an officer your reasons for showing up to vote?
You have these protected rights (freedom of religion, ability to vote as a law abiding citizen over 18), yet are those people who eercise these rights ‘paranoid’ and ‘irrational’? Atheists will argue that the religious folks are irrational.
The fact people may be uncomfortable about certain people wanting to exercise their rights that they’ve had for hundreds of years - because realize this opinion did not change the existing laws, it just commented on them - does not make those people irrational and paranoid. Unarmed law abiding people are killed and preyed upon by criminals, and it happens every day, and we see the stories reported on every day. Rapes, robberies, murder, assaults by armed felons against unarmed law abiding citizens. It is not paranoid to not want this to happen to you, and to be able to defend oneself within the law.
Do you believe police officers are paranoid and irrational for carrying weapons? Many of them, especially in suburbs, have never pulled their gun. The same piece of the state constitution that allows citizens to carry a weapon in the open is the same section that allows police to wear a weapon in the open. The weapon is there IN CASE THEY NEED IT. That is the same reason why law-abiding gun owners wear their weapon - IN CASE THEY NEED IT.
You are the kind of person that may actually have to be a victim of gun violence in order to change your mind about this. I hope you can figure it out without that happening to you.
I think you missed the whole point of the article. The author said nothing about insisting that people who open carry while mowing their lawns or grocery -shopping having an obligation to “justify themselves” — he just said he thinks they’re being obnoxious. He was supporting the AG’s open-carry pronouncement, pointing out that the people who “obnoxiously” open-carry in settings where there’s obviously no need for it, are not a threat, and that it’s concealed-carrying criminals the police ought to be focusing. Open-carrying does not improve your ability to defend yourself, and may even somewhat hinder that ability in some situations, by advertising to a criminal where your gun is located.