Open Carry in the News: Utah, Kansas & Oklahoma

As many of you know from reading some of my earlier posts that I am an open carrier and believe that it is one of the best ways to passively dispel the scare tactics and hysteria that the gun control zealots like to stir up in the imaginations of those who are neutral to the Second Amendment.

In that, if a person who doesn’t know any better and never sees their neighbor, or some law abiding citizen out and about with a gun on their hip then they may fall for the racist and fear mongering tactics that only criminals and bad people have guns.  By open carrying in your daily lives you normalize not only the practice, but firearms in general so that when the gun control zealots want to start talking about how only criminals and maniacs have guns, that little old lady you held the door open for, or the mom holding the baby you let in front of you in the store, or the guy in the Prius who you helped fix his flat, remembers you and realizes that the Brady Campaign or Bloomberg and his illegal mayors are really just pedaling lies.

With that being said, a few Open Carry stories in the news.  Utah is considering legislation to remove the ability of police to trump up charges for open carriers such as disorderly conduct just for the legal practice of open carrying.  The bill would clarify that open carry is legal and allowed in public and no such charges can be levied upon them so long as they are not doing anything threatening.

Just because an officer doesn’t agree or like something a person is doing, does not give them the power to charge them with a crime; colloquially known as “contempt of cop”. Charging an OCer with a crime because it goes against what an officer believes would be akin to charging someone with a crime for wearing white after labor day.  In both situations, someone may not like it but its still legal to do both.

Of course in opposition to this sensible legislation is Gary Sackett, a Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah board member.  Sackett states that:

“It makes people concerned. It makes people fearful. The kind of people who think this is an appropriate thing to do are either paranoid or they want to somehow establish they’re alpha males.”

Mr. Sackett doesn’t seem to have an issue with the irony of his statement.  That he wants to protect the people that open carrying makes fearful while disparaging open carriers as being paranoid.  And when his flawed logic doesn’t work he goes with Markley’s law, stating that open carriers feel inferior and want to establish some alpha male stance.  I won’t even delve into how sexist and bigoted Mr. Sackett is to all the women who open carry in order to protect themselves.  I guess Mr. Sackett prefers women reside in a state of fear instead of living with confidence.

In Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, KS, the city council has passed an ordinance (11-1) allowing open carrying of firearms on all public spaces.  Now, while the 2nd Amendment would stipulate this as a “no duh” situation that doesn’t need an ordinance, it is better to pass pro gun ordinances than to pass gun control ordinances.

While Kansas is one of the 44 states that allow open carry, it does not protect its citizens with statewide preemption in that regard.  Therefore, local municipalities can infringe on the rights of its citizens and travelers to whatever degree they can get away with.  To see a suburb of Kansas City heading in the right direction by removing one such infringement is a good thing.

Hopefully, Kansas as a state will work on preemption so that no city or town in its states will be allowed to arbitrarily violate the civil rights of its people.

Finally, Oklahoma will be becoming an open carry state on Nov. 1st bringing the total number of states that allow some form of OC to 45. (25 states have laws for OC, 20 don’t have laws against OC) While unfortunately in OK one will still be required to have license in order to do so it is still heading in the right direction. With continued pressure, hopefully that requirement will soon be removed as well and all citizens and travelers legally allowed to own a firearm will be able to carry in Oklahoma without asking permission from the government.

After all, we don’t have to ask the governments permission to speak or to go to church…why then must we ask permission to practice our other rights?