Free Republic

The members of South Bay Open Carry want to win people over with reason and sound arguments, not agitation and confrontation. And so, on Saturday, about 20 armed members of the group had a friendly chat with the Manhattan Beach police before they entered the city's annual Home Town Fair. The discussion was to instruct the gun owners on the boundaries of where they could - and couldn't - go. Earlier in the week, the two sides had been at loggerheads about the city's insistence that a facility at nearby American Martyrs Church constituted a schoolyard, places where guns are...

Though the guns that will be holstered to dozens of people at this weekend’s Hometown Fair won’t be loaded, the debate over the right to carry them has been. Despite initial warnings from Hometown Fair Board members and the Manhattan Beach Police Department that people with firearms at the event would be arrested, volunteers of South Bay Open Carry (SBOC) made it clear that they will not leave their guns at home, citing their Second Amendment right to bear arms. A quarrel over guns at the event began with the fair board threatening arrests. “They are opening themselves up to...