I’m from the south…I’m even from the south before the civil-rights movement. My dad was an infantry officer in the Ardennes, and he was a southerner all his life, and an owner of firearms.
Were he alive, he would heavily disapprove of the current open-carry fashion. To the best of my knowledge, he *never* left the house with a weapon and he disapproved of ‘free-lancers’ carrying weapons. He never felt the need to carry weapons, and neither do I; I have been in all kinds of places, at all hours and with all manner of company, in all sections of any number of cities all across the USA, and never once have I been robbed or threatened or held at gunpoint - or even had a weapon *shown* to me in an intimidating fashion. Nor have I ever witnessed it being done, anywhere.
This isn’t to say that I’ve never been afraid, but the places I’ve been most predictably afraid have been those places where people who like to carry weapons hang out - for the simple reason that I can’t trust people who decide to carry death with them at all times. My experience is that such folk are too eager to escalate situations, and my opinion is that knowing they’re packing *does* make them feel safe…and it makes them behave recklessly, more likely to behave aggressively and antagonistically than a situation actually calls for, and doing so makes their situation inherently MORE unsafe for anyone caught up in it.
My dad was big on the idea that every right carries responsibilities - obligations to the communities we live and move in - to our families on up and out to the nation itself - in terms of what we will AND WILL NOT do with our rights, and being aware that no one has the right to infringe the rights of another. Full stop: *that* is the basis for any system of Justice, and the source of all laws. THAT is what makes the difference between the wild-west mentality and the rule of law. And that is why the obligation to avoid escalation weighs more heavily on the one armed with deadly force than it does on those armed only with words and opinions.
I’m about as hippie-dippy as anyone you’ll meet, but there’s no daylight between how I see these things and the way my very traditional and conservative dad saw these things: they’re carved in bedrock.
