Is open not concealed carry the solution?

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I keep reading stories about how if people are allowed to concealed carry then none of this Aurora/Colombine/VA Tech, etc would have happened.

What about just allowing people to open carry everywhere???

With concealed, no one knows who's carrying, with open EVERYONE KNOWS.

Thinking logically (I know, how stupid of me) if I were going to rob lets say a store, and there were a bunch of people standing around, i'd be more willing to take a chance that they were not carrying a gun. If I saw that as few as one or two people were openly carrying a handgun, Id just leave and never attempt it.

I remember my first visit to St Louis a few years ago. 5 Minutes after I walked off the plane, I walk into a restaurant (that had an arbitrary "No Guns Allowed" sign on the door) and as I was seated I see a guy open carrying a 1911. It didn't make me feel unsafe about him, just made me feel unsafe about the area I was in.

Being somewhat new here, maybe I am missing something?
 
In my opinion the "solution" is to severely punish the criminal for their actions. Make the punishment fit the crime and treat criminals like criminals. I also believe that once you commit a serious crime you should lose you "right" as a free person and be treated like a criminal. Of course this may be easy for me to say because I dont break the law so I wouldnt really care how severely a criminal is punished. I am sure opinions will vary on the subject due to humane rights and all but I am a firm believer that law breakers (serious crime) deserve no mercy.
 
Most people aren't going to carry a gun, whether or not it's concealed in Massachusetts, and assuming that some miracle happened and you were allowed to open carry without a SWAT team being called on you, you'd become the target. If someone is bent on doing people harm or violently committing a crime they are going to take out the threat against them.
 
Most people aren't going to carry a gun, whether or not it's concealed in Massachusetts, and assuming that some miracle happened and you were allowed to open carry without a SWAT team being called on you, you'd become the target. If someone is bent on doing people harm or violently committing a crime they are going to take out the threat against them.
If I am carrying a gun, I have made the personal decision to accept certain risks associated with carrying that firearm. If this means that I am targeted instead of an innocent person or child, then I think it is a good decision. This might allow them precious seconds in which they are able to escape while I am distracting and hopefully eliminating the threat.
I was pointing out that although this psycho was hell bent on taking lives, maybe he would have had a harder time finding a venue if he had to try and avoid gun toting people.
How many times has a gun range been attacked like this?
 
Given the political realities that in many areas an assault charge is all but certain if anyone such as makes an accusation regarding a threat - even with no proof other than the word of the accuser - open carry is tactically unwise. The chances someone will falsely say "he threatened to shoot me" go way down if they do not know you are carrying.
 
I have lived in open carry states: Arizona and Alaska. I never saw a much open carry except out in the desert or the tundra.

In a dimly lighted theater, how, pray tell is a gunman going to see who is open carrying?

I suppose we are back to Heinlein with regard to "an armed society is a polite society..." but let's face it Colorado (I have lived there three different times) is overall a gun culture state (except maybe for Boulder), just like the Giffords shooting which took place in what is arguably the most gun culture friendly state in the union: Arizona. No one, to the best of our knowledge, was on the scene with a firearm when the event transpired, if they were, they elected not to return fire for some damn sensible reasons or simply plain fear. We will never know.

The thing of it is, is that even in gun culture states, most people don't carry open or concealed.
 
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A lot of it has something to do with when and where you grew up. I grew up in an openly gun friendly state and it wasn't uncommon to see someone open carrying. Geeze people keep their rifles in gun racks in their trucks, openly visible. There was a time when I went to the airport to board a DC-3 (boy am I giving my age away) to fly to San Antonio, Tx and I was open carrying a .38 special revolver. No one batted an eye.

The sheep have been so brainwashed into thinking that anyone with a gun is evil, so when they see one they panic.
 
You can't prevent crazy people from doing crazy things. No law, regulation, rule, explicit or implicit is going to stop a madman from wreaking havoc.

A reasonable, cost-effective and moral argument would be to shape public policy in such a way that as many good people can purchase and use defensive firearms either openly or concealed. Guns level the playing field between all parties. Since they're are more relatively good people than relatively bad people, terrorist attacks are a pretty rare event.

There's no 100% solution though. Never has been. Never will so long as humans exist.
 
A lot of it has something to do with when and where you grew up. I grew up in an openly gun friendly state and it wasn't uncommon to see someone open carrying. Geeze people keep their rifles in gun racks in their trucks, openly visible. There was a time when I went to the airport to board a DC-3 (boy am I giving my age away) to fly to San Antonio, Tx and I was open carrying a .38 special revolver. No one batted an eye.

The sheep have been so brainwashed into thinking that anyone with a gun is evil, so when they see one they panic.

And I'll be able to tell my grandchildren that in 2012, we used to go to the grocery store, movie theaters and library without having to be inspected by TSA agents. And they'll chuckle. [sad2]
 
Ive been bashed in the past for bashing open carriers.

That being said, I won't do it because I think it presents a tactical disadvantage - if you're the criminal, who are you going to shoot first in a murder spree? the guy that can fight back, of course. Cops open carry and while there is a representative deterrence built in, its important to note that 1 in 4 officers who die in the line of duty are murdered with their service weapon.

I conceal. The only way Id open carry is at the range or if Im in the wilderness - beyond that, I prefer to be unassuming in all manners. I dont advertise that I own guns. I dont wear the tacti-cool outfits, even though I have some nice stuff from Sig and Glock. Under the radar is probably best to keep the subhumans guessing.
 
Ideally it would be up to the individual whether he or she carried openly or concealed. I grew up where open carry was still fairly common. Even here in Massachusetts I've discovered that if you're over 30 and dressed fairly neatly, people tend not to take notice of a gun on your hip. (Admittedly, I'm not in Boston or some similar fascist enclave.) OTOH, I personally prefer to carry concealed for a couple of reasons. First there's the selfish tactical reason: I want the bad guy to realize I'm carrying just about the time my first bullet hits him. There's also the altruistic reason: when bad guys don't know who might be carrying, the world becomes a safer place regardless of whether any good guys are actually carrying.

Ken
 
I like concealed, I like that people don't know...open carry would make me a #1 target for someone wanting to do some damage.
 
A far as I am concerned the reason to support OC is first because of this pesky natural righs and second because it elimintes all the "wind blew open my coat" and "brandishing" nonsense..

As a practical matter I don't think it would palpably change the crime dynamic. Criminals are pretty good About figuring out where they are at risk whether from CCW, police presense or otherwise.

I should be to drive to the range with OWB holster, have fun the and then drive back and stop for gas without a wardrobe change. Same goes for hiking. Outside of that, I would keep it concealed regardless of OC friendly laws.
 
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You can't prevent crazy people from doing crazy things. No law, regulation, rule, explicit or implicit is going to stop a madman from wreaking havoc.

A reasonable, cost-effective and moral argument would be to shape public policy in such a way that as many good people can purchase and use defensive firearms either openly or concealed. Guns level the playing field between all parties. Since they're are more relatively good people than relatively bad people, terrorist attacks are a pretty rare event.

There's no 100% solution though. Never has been. Never will so long as humans exist.

Nicely put.

Personally, I agree CC makes more sense than OC for the same reason Ken and so many others do - "When bad guys don't know who might be carrying, the world becomes a safer place regardless of whether any good guys are actually carrying." Of course, that become ever more true as the known percentage of owners goes up.

AC
 
Say there are thee boxes on a table. All have $50 in them, one also contains a scorpion. A person is given the option of either reaching into any box for the money and risking a deadly sting or just walking away. Odds are they walk away and you keep your money.

Now plainly label the box with the scorpion and give the person the same option. Odds are they will walk away with $100, if they don't stomp on the scorpion box first and take that $50 as well.

"Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack." - Sun Tzu
 
Say there are thee boxes on a table. All have $50 in them, one also contains a scorpion. A person is given the option of either reaching into any box for the money and risking a deadly sting or just walking away. Odds are they walk away and you keep your money.

Now plainly label the box with the scorpion and give the person the same option. Odds are they will walk away with $100, if they don't stomp on the scorpion box first and take that $50 as well.

"Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack." - Sun Tzu
Thats a straw man argument.

Why not replace the boxes with banks and scorpion with a concealed carrying person. Per your thought process, odds are, someone will rob the two banks they know has no one with a gun inside. and leave the other bank alone, or shoot the guy with the gun and rob all three.
If this were true, banks would be robbed all day every day.
 
Say there are thee boxes on a table. All have $50 in them, one also contains a scorpion. A person is given the option of either reaching into any box for the money and risking a deadly sting or just walking away. Odds are they walk away and you keep your money.

Now plainly label the box with the scorpion and give the person the same option. Odds are they will walk away with $100, if they don't stomp on the scorpion box first and take that $50 as well.

"Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack." - Sun Tzu

+1
 
Why not replace the boxes with banks and scorpion with a concealed carrying person. Per your thought process, odds are, someone will rob the two banks they know has no one with a gun inside. and leave the other bank alone, or shoot the guy with the gun and rob all three. If this were true, banks would be robbed all day every day.

In order to evaluate the bank analogy, one could compare robbery rates of banks with, and without, visible armed guards - being careful to normalize for demographics (bank size, neighborhood, similarity of layout, etc.)
 
Thats a straw man argument.

Why not replace the boxes with banks and scorpion with a concealed carrying person. Per your thought process, odds are, someone will rob the two banks they know has no one with a gun inside. and leave the other bank alone, or shoot the guy with the gun and rob all three.
If this were true, banks would be robbed all day every day.
Non sequitur. Banks have security systems, cameras and alarms, which I would expect are required by their insurers. Many also have armed security - if not at all business hours then during critical times of cash movement. This, like the random concealed carry in a group of potential targets serves as a deterrent to the criminal. The prevalence and requirement of alarms in banks is not a fair or accurate comparison to individuals who choose to arm themselves or not, and whether those who choose to arm themselves do so in a conspicuous manner.

Maybe you missed my point and my apologies if it was too cerebral; it was not an argument against CCW and hardly a straw man argument. The scorpion DOES represent someone who is armed - one concealed and in the second example one who is open carrying. It is simply an illustration of why concealed carry (vs open carry) may have more benefits to the person carrying as well as to those who choose not to arm themselves.
 
Most people aren't going to carry a gun, whether or not it's concealed in Massachusetts, and assuming that some miracle happened and you were allowed to open carry without a SWAT team being called on you, you'd become the target. If someone is bent on doing people harm or violently committing a crime they are going to take out the threat against them.

In some situations yes. In some no.

http://www.examiner.com/article/open-carry-deters-armed-robbery-kennesaw

I've heard more stories, but this was the first one where I recalled enough details for it to be Googleable.

I don't think it's possible to make a decision on this issue based on the numbers...it's impossible to know how many times a criminal saw an OC gun, or an NRA sticker and walked away because of it. It may happen all the time or it may be vanishingly rare.

This should be a personal choice, based on the best information you have, your lifestyle, your defense needs, your environment, and your personal comfort level. I will be so happy when we get to the point that OC vs. CC can be argued more like whether to carry a revolver or a semi-auto.
 
Most people aren't going to carry a gun, whether or not it's concealed in Massachusetts, and assuming that some miracle happened and you were allowed to open carry without a SWAT team being called on you, you'd become the target. If someone is bent on doing people harm or violently committing a crime they are going to take out the threat against them.

I disagree with pretty much all of the above.


You can't prevent crazy people from doing crazy things. No law, regulation, rule, explicit or implicit is going to stop a madman from wreaking havoc.

A reasonable, cost-effective and moral argument would be to shape public policy in such a way that as many good people can purchase and use defensive firearms either openly or concealed. Guns level the playing field between all parties. Since they're are more relatively good people than relatively bad people, terrorist attacks are a pretty rare event.

There's no 100% solution though. Never has been. Never will so long as humans exist.

Agreed 100%.

A lot of it has something to do with when and where you grew up. I grew up in an openly gun friendly state and it wasn't uncommon to see someone open carrying. Geeze people keep their rifles in gun racks in their trucks, openly visible. There was a time when I went to the airport to board a DC-3 (boy am I giving my age away) to fly to San Antonio, Tx and I was open carrying a .38 special revolver. No one batted an eye.

The sheep have been so brainwashed into thinking that anyone with a gun is evil, so when they see one they panic.

I remember gun racks with guns here in MA, both in trucks and in houses. I used to have one behind my kitchen door back in the early 90's.

I like the one about the plane. If you are on a small plane (piper cub or whatever) flying out of state, is it OK to bring a gun along? Where does TSA get the authority over private airlines, anyhow?
 
How many people try to rob cops or hold places up when a cop is inside?

The only difference between the UPS guy in uniform and the cop in uniform is one of them is open carrying.

There's your answer.
 
Non sequitur. Banks have security systems, cameras and alarms, which I would expect are required by their insurers. Many also have armed security - if not at all business hours then during critical times of cash movement. This, like the random concealed carry in a group of potential targets serves as a deterrent to the criminal. The prevalence and requirement of alarms in banks is not a fair or accurate comparison to individuals who choose to arm themselves or not, and whether those who choose to arm themselves do so in a conspicuous manner.

Maybe you missed my point and my apologies if it was too cerebral; it was not an argument against CCW and hardly a straw man argument. The scorpion DOES represent someone who is armed - one concealed and in the second example one who is open carrying. It is simply an illustration of why concealed carry (vs open carry) may have more benefits to the person carrying as well as to those who choose not to arm themselves.
I didn't miss your point, it was just a bad argument. Your argument is a straw man because you set it up to prove your point of view only by setting up something that was easier to knock down than my original example.
The correct way to illustrate this, using your example, would be:

The example I used in my original post was a store with multiple patrons (some with open carry and others unknown carry). For your example to work with this criteria, you would need to only have one box (the store) and each open carrier represented as a scorpion and all of the patrons represented as $50 bills (assuming also that I was robbing each person and not just the stores cash register). Now, would anyone be willing to reach into this box, knowing there are scorpions (that they can plainly see running around in there) to try and grab a couple of $50 bills before ultimately getting stung or would they just look for a box without scorpions?

Your example was a one-on-one type of attack and the correct way to illustrate your example would be:
There are 3 boxes, each with a $50 bill inside. One of these boxes definitely has a scorpion inside. The other two boxes might contain a scorpion or they might not (because with open carry a weapon is always know to exist but CCW it might exist or might not exist, we won't know until provoked).

And how is what I said a "non sequitur"?
 
Based on personal experience ands that related by students and friends, O/C is never going to be very common. It's a lot less hassle than CC, but most people just don't want to deal with the attention, even in very friendly venues like my hometown here.

No way in the wold to feter a dediated attcker that's loaded for bear and prepared to deal with resistance as the guy in Aurora was.

I TRAIN for headshots. But in a theater, with the lights out, pandemonium reigning around me, people running all over the place and maybe 50-70 feet between me and the attacker, it's not likely I'd take one for fear of hitting an innocent. Sure', I'd take a couple to the torso, but when that itterly fails because he was wearing a vest, THEN WHAT?

You can't prevent or deter all evils. You just can't. You may or may not get lucky, but that's LUCK. A truly dedicated and thoughtful attacker, like this guy was, there's not a lot you can do. That's just the way it is.

And while this guy killed 12 people, let's remember that on the same day, 4000 people died from eating too many big Macs. (Heart disease). 12 sounds bad. and I'm not trying to minimize it, but when measured against 15-16,000 annual homicides in the USA, it's not a lot.
 
And while this guy killed 12 people, let's remember that on the same day, 4000 people died from eating too many big Macs. (Heart disease). 12 sounds bad. and I'm not trying to minimize it, but when measured against 15-16,000 annual homicides in the USA, it's not a lot.
4000 people CHOOSE TO KILL THEMSELVES from eating too many BigMacs.

Based on your logic, I guess the 3000 people that were killed in the 9/11 attacks don't really matter either then.
 
4000 people CHOOSE TO KILL THEMSELVES from eating too many BigMacs.

Based on your logic, I guess the 3000 people that were killed in the 9/11 attacks don't really matter either then.

I don't think that's Bill's point.

I think Bill's suggesting that, while both the Aurora attack and 9/11 attacks were both human tragedies, the reality is that death-by-terrorist is extremely rare. Almost vanishingly rare. Like scientific-notation rare. I found this, but it doesn't include the VT attack (not sure why not): http://www.quora.com/How-many-Americans-have-died-in-terrorist-attacks-since-9-11

Whereas deaths by heart disease and cancer are probably the top-two Pareto bars. They don't get any press because, as they say in the news industry, "that don't sell ink".
 
I see a lot of good points and arguments; but i think the thread is getting away from the main question. I think mikem317 said it best. Laws are put in place for a reason, but criminals still break them. Then, more laws are put on top of those laws, and criminals break those. There is nothing that can be done weather open carry, concealed carry, or comin around knockin on LTC holders doors collecting all their guns (which I pray never happens.) An unfortunate event yes, but I really dont think too much could have been done to prevent/stop it from happening and I dont think much can be done to prevent this form happening again. There are always going to be outliers.
 
4000 people CHOOSE TO KILL THEMSELVES from eating too many BigMacs.

Based on your logic, I guess the 3000 people that were killed in the 9/11 attacks don't really matter either then.

That's not my logic, that's your logical fallacy.

But coming to your point, no, I don't think 3,000 deaths from a totally non-repeatable tactic justify DHS, TSA or any of the nonsense that we are faced with as a nation.

It was tragic and evil. It is not a thing that should have justified an attack on Iraq, justified the Patriot Act, TSA or DHS. Because NONE of those things would have prevented 911.

What prevents future 911s is not a ban on dildos or nail-clippers, it's a realization that terrorists taking over a plane will kill EVeRYONE on board. Passengers subduing people is by this points, passe it happens so often. 911 is a trick pony that only performs one time.

But hey, your inability to put 12 in perspective with 15,000 isn't missed. You're a hysterical idiot. -Nuff said.
 
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