Freakout in Maine:

The gun lobby makes the facile claim that since carrying a gun openly is legal, why should concealing the gun make any difference? Well, I suppose carrying a gun openly tends to attract the attention of bank guards, convenience store cashiers, police officers on patrol and the rest of us trying to keep our distance from kooks. And most gun owners recognize that carrying a gun openly does look a little foolish.

This is perhaps an accidental use of the word facile (or at least, he didn’t know what he was doing).  He charges the “gun lobby” (whomever that is) with a facile argument, and then proceeds to offer up what we might consider a facile argument himself for why there is a difference between open and permitted concealed carry.  But I notice that he doesn’t charge police officers with looking “a little foolish” for the open carry of firearms.  Perhaps he should explain why he thinks there’s a difference between police officers and anyone else openly carrying weapons.  Tennessee versus Garner clearly stipulates that police officers can only discharge their firearms in self defense or defense of someone else, which is also clearly the stipulations under which we all operate.  So I expect that to be the next subject the author tackles in an article that doesn’t engage in facile argumentation.

Freakout in the great Northwest:

As I strolled through Target the other day, feeling as safe as can be among the wondrous outlay of products available for purchase, I passed the furniture department where a man and woman shopped for a shelf.

Strapped to the man’s belt was a handgun in a hard-plastic case. I understand that in the gun community, such a weapon makes the carrier feel safe; however, it had the opposite effect on me. How was I to know that the person carrying that gun was someone I could trust? Would he, at any moment, misread a stranger’s comment or movement, pull his gun and blast him/her away?

I tell you, I didn’t breathe normally until I’d cleared the doors of Target and was heading to my car.

In other news, there was another wrong-home police raid in New York, a North Charleston cop just shot a man in the back for a minor traffic stop, the Watertown reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing involved “officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons,” an officer in Texas “accidentally” fired his gun on a junior high school campus, cops are still shooting their guns in town hall, and a quarter of a million dogs are shot each year by cops, often (always?) needlessly.

The writer offered up no explanation as to why she trusts cops carrying guns openly but no one else.  Perhaps that will be covered in a future article.