Open Carry is NOT the Answer

Open-carrying of weapons isn't ideal for stopping armed bad guys.

Even in supposedly gun-free Europe, guns are easy to get for anyone who meets the price, as the people of Paris recently discovered to their misfortune.  In America, there are so many hunters who spend so much money on hunting licenses and other equipment that the "long guns" as used in the recent San Bernardino shooting are even easier to get.

Regardless of the painful fact that bad guys have no trouble getting all the guns they want, the global knee-jerk response to the Paris terrorist attacks suggests that our leaders fear that they've made it too hard for terrorists, drug dealers, and other malefactors to get their hands on machine guns.  Unlike their solutions to most other problems, they've taken immediate, highly effective action to make it a lot easier for bad guys to get high-end guns while French leaders and Mr. Obama are talking about tightening restrictions on law-abiding gun owners.

Just look at these convenient walking gun stores!  Limited selection, but no cash needed, and no background check.  Just knock off the cop, the gun's yours, and you get extra points from Allah for killing another infidel!

Walking sentry duty in airports or subway stations is going to get real old real fast.  People get careless when boredom sets in.  What if one of the jihadists is a pretty girl who doesn't mind dressing provocatively to support the cause?  She can walk up to a mobile gun store, ask for directions, and drop her purse.  Her confederate shoves a knife through the cop's spine, and they make off with the artillery.  They can practice on drunks in back alleys until they get the thrust just right for a quick, silent kill.

This is an age-old pickpocket tactic which, depending on the jurisdiction, may be called "jostling."  It means distracting the victim while a confederate removes his valuables - in this case, his life.

Every open-carry person is a walking gun store.  Do we really want to make it that easy for bad guys?

When, oh when, will the Europeans listen to their own experts?  ABC News reports:

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month's deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya - and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians. ...

Noble said there are really only two choices ... either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

There aren't enough police to guard every vulnerable facility and crowd, we are a long way from creating a secure perimeter around the entire Western world.  Even if we could do that, a lot of bad guys and potential bad guys are already here.  After all, the Boston Marathon bombers were admitted as refugees and lived off welfare until they decided to wage jihad.  If we want protection, we must protect ourselves, but open carry just makes you the first target.

How many retired police, firemen, and military do we have?  What if most of them carried concealed, where the terrorists can't see the artillery until lead flies back at them?

Actually, we don't have to ask: we know.  What happened to the two terrorists who tried to shoot up the Texas Mohammad cartoon contest?  They were ventilated as soon as they made themselves known, with no innocents so much as injured, aside from a security guard who took a bullet to the leg.  That's a good-guy bad-guy kill ratio we can applaud.

Until our ruling elites figure out that these bad guys really do want to kill as many people as possible, such successes will be all too rare.

Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name.  Read other Scragged.com articles by Will Offensicht or other articles on Society.
Reader Comments

Surprise! Looks like the San Bernardino killers were... wait for it...

Muslims.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-syed-farook-had-traveled-to-saudi-arabia-married-appeared-to-live-american-dream-co-workers-say-20151202-story.html

And not the sort you'd suspect either:

They and other colleagues said Farook was a devout Muslim, but rarely discussed religion at work.

"He never struck me as a fanatic, he never struck me as suspicious," said Griselda Reisinger, who worked with Farook before leaving the agency in May.

December 3, 2015 8:18 AM

Yes, and our panderer in chief is bloviating about gun control yet again. Is he still going to insist in letting how many more jihadis? Does he have some kind of quota?

December 3, 2015 2:09 PM

The NYT weighs in:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/us/san-bernardino-shooting.html?_r=0

They had at least 12 pipe bombs which the FBI said were pretty sophisticated. Clearly, ordinary workplace violence, just ask the O. HOw would gun control keep them from making pipe bombs?

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — The F.B.I. is treating its inquiry into the massacre here as a counter-terrorism investigation, two law enforcement officials said Thursday, based on materials the suspects stockpiled — including explosives — their Middle East travels and evidence that one of them had been in touch with people with Islamist extremist views, both in the United States and abroad.

December 3, 2015 2:24 PM

Mr. Obama says that mass shootings occur ONLY in the US. That's probably news to the French and to the Norwegians...

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/12/03/facts-shoot-holes-in-obamas-claim-that-us-is-only-host-to-mass-killings.html

The article reports that:

In just 2015, France suffered more casualties – killings and injuries – from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (508 to 424). This number includes the San Bernandino massacre on Wednesday.

December 3, 2015 5:18 PM

I think it lacks all credibility that a terrorist pair, would choose this method of getting a handgun.

Has it ever happened before? I don't think so.

December 31, 2015 10:35 PM

@ M. Johnson - Sure it has. During WW II, the allies distributed thousands of really cheap, one-shot pistols. They were labeled "get a better gun." The goal was to shoot a soldier and take his armament.

Very old technique.

January 1, 2016 3:02 PM

We told you so. This guy checked out a weapon from a mobile gun store:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-shooting/attacker-kills-three-in-liege-dies-after-gunbattle-with-police-idUSKCN1IU0VS?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

A public prosecutor told a news conference that the man attacked the policewomen from behind with a knife, described as a box-cutter by RTBF, around 10:30 a.m. (4.30 a.m. ET) on a boulevard in the center of Belgium’s third city, near the German border.

After stabbing the officers, prosecutor Philippe Dulieu said, the man seized one of their handguns and shot both women dead before walking down the street and shooting dead a 22-year-old man who was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car.

The man then made his way into a high school where he took a woman employee hostage, triggering a major intervention by armed police. Pupils were moved to safety as a gunbattle broke out that sent people in the street racing for cover. Several police were wounded before the attacker was finally killed.

May 29, 2018 11:50 AM
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