Quote:
Originally Posted by gillygirl
It’s not as if the sign is saying you can’t have a gun at all, just not while you’re in that establishment. It’s every business’s right to determine what they will and will not allow in their establishment, just as it is your right to own a gun.
I grew up in suburban Boston having never seen a gun. When I moved to a semi-rural area and saw some hunters caring their shotguns out of the woods, I was startled initially, but then realized it was perfectly normal there. When I saw my first open carry, I remembered I was in Florida…perfectly normal there. Sometimes it just takes people time to adjust.
As for drama, don’t you think your long posts add to it?
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Re; stores rights, I 100% agree with you. But the store(s) are not making such decisions in a vacuum. And also likely they are not making such decisions based on a pole of their customers. In America we react to the loudest voice in the crowd, so people who are currently enjoying carrying openly and not perceiving any problem are going to store managers to say I want you to make sure you hear my preference to continue to do so. What store owners usually hear is the few who complain and then they react to that vocal group without gathering input from the masses. And once you put any restriction in place, this X times harder to get it overturned unless there is a massive uprising of concern.
As for you comments about it taking people time to adjust, I totally agree. This will fizzle. NH will not become the wild west of old, and people will get used to the very few who insist in showing off their hardware.
And finally we get to drama, and again you are 100% correct, and thats my goal in those long posts. As I have found over the years that the only way you tamp down utter nonsense is to totally ignore it, or drown it out with an even higher level of drama. Personally I prefer to ignore it and eventually I tire of the nonsense, but some matters hit a nerve as being total BS and I feel some sense to speak up and try to crush the madness.
And so in this case the only two valid points anyone should be interested in is that some people are uncomfortable seeing open carry, much like they were uncomfortable my bikers in Laconia many years ago or seeing people from foreign countries or monks chanting in a public place. But ultimately we got over all of those fears.
And the other point is that open carry has resulted in no actual harm coming to anyone. Virtually no other activity at this time has such a near perfect record of not impacting the public. Even growing flowers has produced more problems with people getting stung by bees!
So there we have it in a nutshell, open carry is an activity that an infinitesimally small percent of our population practice and it makes some portion of our population uncomfortable. AND so far, it has resulted in no actual harm being suffered by anyone. I only wish the discussion could stop here.