Since all of the cool kids are doing it, I might as well jump on the bandwagon and air out my opinions on open carry.

Here we go:

Your right to swing your fist ends where your fist impacts the nose of others.

Clear enough?  I don’t care if someone wants to open carry a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun, a bazooka, a slingshot, or an AC-20 from a BattleMech that’s been in their family for generations, so long as they are not acting in such a way that either breaks the law or makes life hard for the rest of us who want to be left alone to buy our groceries while carrying a defensive firearm and writing run-on sentences.

I’m not sure who said it first, but the first rule of open carry, as it should be in most things in life, is “Don’t be a dick.”  There are circumstances where open carry is appropriate and there are circumstances where open  carry is inappropriate.  It’s your responsibility, which comes with the right to carry, to know the difference.

I mostly carry concealed, but I do open carry on occasion.  Those occasions are not limited to when I am going to a gun-friendly environment, such as going to the range or meeting with like-minded people.  It includes going to a semi-rural home improvement center, a suburban grocery store, or whatever.  To me, having a pistol on my hip is no different from having a multi-tool or a cell phone on my hip.  I’ve only been asked about it on two occasions.  Once was a little old lady who asked me if it was legal, and the other was a police officer who asked which model of 1911 it was and where I bought it.

So, in my environment, people just don’t seem to care about open carrying a pistol, or if they do, they’re not challenging me on it.  So I guess, at least in suburban Louisville, that battle either has been won, or never needed to be fought in the first place.

There are circumstances where carrying a rifle or shotgun is appropriate, but those circumstances are, for me, very limited.  I live in a semi-rural, semi-suburban environment.  It’s just not in the social norm for me to carry a long gun with me as I go about my daily business, so I don’t.  In an other environment, I might, but it just doesn’t come up in my routine.

The same cannot be said for open carry, either of a pistol or a long arm, in other environments.  You have to decide what is appropriate all on your own.

So basically, if it works for you, and what you do doesn’t make my life harder, it’s none of my business.

But please, before you put on your bad attitude tee shirt and slip the patrol sling over your head, please consider whether what you’re going to do is going to harm the rest of us.  Is making a political or social statement worth the risk to our place in the commons of ideas when it comes to gun rights?  Is the payoff for carrying your shotgun into a library worth the recoil that will inevitably happen, mostly on the part of people who otherwise wouldn’t care about guns?

So basically, aggressive open carriers have their rights, and that’s a beautiful thing.  But please remember the responsibilities that come with them.  Don’t make life harder for the rest of us while you’re trying to express your rights.