Bob Owens On Open Carry In The Atlanta AIrport
BY Herschel Smith
9 years, 5 months ago
Via Mike Vanderboegh, Bob Owens:
As a direct result of Cooley’s stunt, Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson has now proposed a federal law to ban both open and concealed carry in airports … Thankfully, is is very unlikely that Johnson will amass enough support to make this bill viable.
Sadly, we’re now having to devote energies on defense to explain why Johnson’s proposed bill really isn’t “common sense.” It’s a prospect made all the more difficult because your average citizen isn’t going to be able to grasp why a mentally healthy person might want or need to walk into an airport with AR-15 with a drum magazine inserted to see someone off at the airport, unless that airport is in Afghanistan.
When gun rights activists and pro-gun lawmakers have to deal with distracting, grandstanding behavior like Cooley’s, it takes away time we could better spend attempting to pass other pro-gun laws, or dismantle gun control laws already on the books.
Jim Cooley’s fifteen-minute stunt did nothing to help the gun rights movement, and gave gun control supporters ammunition that they will reuse again and again for years to come to portray gun owners as extreme, paranoid, and out of touch with the American mainstream.
That’s not helping us, and never will.
I’m not even close … no, let me find a better way to say this … I am literally light years from understanding Bob’s argument. If I were to lay it out syllogistically, it may look something like this.
- We currently have rights understood to be so by the authorities and people, one of which is open carry of both long guns and handguns.
- Exercising that right may invoke the disapprobation of the lawmakers.
- The lawmakers may remove their written approval.
- If they remove their written approval, we can’t exercise that right.
But of course the problem is that if we could never exercise the right without recognition of it being removed, recognition of it was a phantom to begin with. It doesn’t work for me to say that perhaps he should have carried a handgun openly, because the same person could have gotten offended at the handgun, which the media surely would have called a “high caliber high magazine clip assault handgun.” It would effect the same end for the collectivists. If they are offended at long guns, they will be offended at handguns.
Now, if Bob’s real concern is that he believes we are ostracizing ourselves, then he is lobbying for the wrong thing. He should be lobbying for a new law prohibiting open carry.
So completely aside from the issue of whether you concur with what this person did (i.e., carry of an AR-15 in an airport) or even agree with open carry, Bob’s argument makes absolutely no sense to me. I don’t understand why he is in a fit and why he presented the argument the way he did. Again, if he believes there is no reason to open carry and he wants folks behave differently, he can lobby for a law and we can evaluate his argument on its merits.
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On June 19, 2015 at 9:35 am, madoradataman said:
I agree with you at the logical level. And having been around firearms my whole life, I don’t have a problem with open carry of any kind.
However, let’s remember that we are fighting to retain our rights, against a mis-educated public in many cases. In the PR arena, whether it’s the 2A or any other part of the Bill of rights (and they are all connected), we are done no service when people do deliberately provocative and dumb things.
On June 19, 2015 at 6:05 pm, Chuck said:
So if exercising our rights is “behaving stupidly”, how does it matter if new laws are passed restricting rights that can’t be exercised anyway?
On June 19, 2015 at 9:39 pm, madoradataman said:
It doesn’t. Understand, I’m on your side here. I just see no reason to provoke hysterical panic amongst the uneducated, unsophisticated fools on the other side until we have a chance to calm them down to see reason.
It is like the first amendment rights — you have an absolute right to say what is on your mind; BUT, its probably not a good idea to walk into a bar (or anywhere) and call everyone’s mother/spouse/whatever a whore and not expect an extreme adverse reaction.
The argument here isn’t about basic principles; it’s about strategy and tactics.
On June 22, 2015 at 10:42 pm, HempRopeAndStreetlight said:
We don’t comply. On pain of death. God help the pig that tries to come between us and our constitutionally enumerated civil liberties. Cause we won’t.
On June 19, 2015 at 9:50 am, Pericles said:
Site should be renamed to bearingconcealedarms.com
On June 19, 2015 at 12:50 pm, Jack Crabb said:
“I don’t understand why he is in a fit and why he presented the argument the way he did.”
It’s simple. Owens is nothing but a copsucking statist hack.
On June 19, 2015 at 12:51 pm, Haywood Jablome said:
Thanks for occasionally highlighting Bob’s douche-nozzlery so I remember why I stopped visiting his site a long time ago!!
On June 22, 2015 at 10:40 pm, HempRopeAndStreetlight said:
To discover why Bob has done such a huge roundabout you need to look at who saved him from poverty. He was floundering financially. The bearing arms job kept him out of penury, and he’s writing what he’s told to write. Bob Owens has “owners” now, and they are working the puppet strings.
The proper course of action on our part is to:
1: Figure out which mushy .org is paying the bills over at bearing arms. We tune THEM up and I guarantee Owens’s tune will change. We really need to see who’s behind the stage curtain on this one.
2: We need to help financially support David Codrea so that he does not end up in the same boat – beholden to some interest, with strings attached, in order to feed himself.
On June 29, 2015 at 9:31 am, bryan said:
pj media