[G Larry]

Open carry in public, populated areas is counterproductive.

As a CCW license owner, the first rule of security is “keep ‘em guessing”.

When a threat knows your defense, he can defeat it.

Quit the show-off stuff and quit giving the anti-gun crowd more fodder.

[mad_as_he$$]

I couldn't disagree more. I open carry often. I usually have at least one person who comes up to me and asks legitimate questions about the law etc. One of the best experiences I had happened two years ago. I live in a semi rural area. I went to the mailbox at the end of the driveway and a min-van I had never seen before went past me. The woman driving was a Kalifornia transplant. She saw my gun, freaked and called the Sheriff. When the Deputy showed up she was babbling incoherently, to the point where the Deputy threatened to put her in cuffs and throw her in the cruiser. Suddenly her husband shows up and gets all bent out of shape and does wind up cuffed in the cruiser. After about 20 minutes, two Deputies and a Sargent later they finally got it through their thick skulls that it was perfectly legal. Long short, they moved back to Kalifornia and the paper published a very good story about how open carry was legal and the benefits of it - very positive piece. The twofer is that there is one less Kalifornia family in my neighborhood (ones that would be completely helpless in a disaster).

[mvpel]

G Larry,

When I was visiting Phoenix, Arizona, I was at a little motel and wanted to go out and find some Cheetos and a soda or some such, so I was walking across the broad motel parking lot at around 10:00pm, towards the street, intending to walk down the block a bit.

Little did I know that the motel was in a kind of run-down part of the area when I booked it. I fully realized the implications of this fact when a young fellow was making a beeline towards me diagonally across the empty street. I was carrying openly, since I didn’t have an applicable concealed carry license being a resident of California at the time.

I turned my body a bit so that the sickly orange glow of the street light caught my right hip, and it was as if the fellow hit an invisible brick wall in the middle of the street. He immediately turned away and hurried off down the street.

If I had been carrying concealed, he would have been up in my face asking me for the time or a dollar or some typical mugger bull____, and he would have been “kept guessing” right up until I pulled my firearm and shot him.

And that would have been much more of a hassle for me than an invisible brick wall in the middle of the street created by the sight of my openly holstered firearm.

He knew my defense, and he knew he wasn’t willing to even try to defeat it.