About that Open Carry

For nearly a decade I have been living in states which gun owners in the illiberal democracies that are the coastal enclaves of our country would call “Free America”. Yet sometimes I still have to stop and shake my head just a bit.

Where I spent much of my life, and all of my law enforcement career, in metropolitan California the very idea that ordinary folks would carry firearms for their protection always seemed a vague concept at a societal level. We have the police, and they will come when we call, seemed to be the pervasive mindset going back to my childhood. Concealed carry permits could be obtained in many, but not all, of the 58 counties and were often subject to the political whims of issuing agency heads, police chiefs and sheriffs, in whom the statutes invested the authority to issue. That the authority to issue also led to corruption in more than one instance could likely be chalked up to simple human nature… power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Open carry of loaded firearms was a thing in California, even though virtually no one did it outside of rural areas while hunting, fishing and hiking, until 1967. It was in May of that year that members of the Black Panther Party showed up at the capitol in Sacramento carrying rifles and shotguns. Perfectly within their rights and the law.

That event, predictably, scared the peewater out of the Legislature. We can’t have professed revolutionaries, who also all happened to be men of color, trooping around the capitol while armed went the thinking. So the Legislature quickly passed, and Governor Reagan just as quickly signed, the Mulford Act which outlawed the carrying of loaded firearms in public places for anyone who was not exempt, such as peace officers, the military and licensed security guards.

Open carry of unloaded firearms, a rather dubious and pointless exercise on face, remained legal in California until the early 2000s when civil rights activists offended urban sophisticates by openly carrying into places like restaurants and coffee shops. The Legislature responded by criminalizing that method of carry as well. For now, as various civil rights cases continue to be litigated, the practice in California remains illegal.

When I moved to Nevada I found that state law neither authorized, nor prohibited, the open carry of firearms. This aligns to the concept in law that if the statutes are mute on the subject then whatever the conduct is, de facto, it is a lawful conduct. There are some time and place restrictions, but generally if a person is able to lawfully own a firearm in Nevada, they can carry it openly with no permit required. To carry concealed requires a permit which has a training requirement and a modest live fire qualification attached.

As a former cop who had carried a handgun openly across three decades, and as someone who deeply understood the risks involved, the idea of openly carrying had exactly zero novelty to me. I pretty much always carried concealed unless I was hiking in the back country of the Sierra Nevadas, training or teaching. Since moving to Wyoming a few years ago, where permitless carry openly or concealed is a thing, I still go concealed unless I am out recreating in remote locations and I keep a valid permit.

While I support the right of people who want to carry openly, I suspect a vast majority have never thought about the risks, nor trained specifically around those risks. My thinking, which is shared by every professional trainer I know, is that openly carrying a handgun as a matter of daily routine in public places is not a particularly good idea. If people are going to do it, then they should do it from a perspective of having done their personal risk analysis, seeking out competent instruction, and putting their gear and skills to the test against real world derived constraints.

That’s what should happen, anyway. But there is a dearth of training focused on open carry, and since no permit is required anyway why bother to train? I have this gun, goes the logic, and it will protect me.

One of the things I have noticed, and which the internet supplies no shortage of examples of, is that a lot of open carriers are using gear wholly unsuited to the purpose. In some cases they use a holster that is downright unsafe, or even no holster at all. In this photo we can see three holsters which have a single level of retention, but only the one in the center has an active, mechanical, retention to prevent the gun from being drawn. None of these holsters are suitable for open carry in my opinion.

The reason the holsters are not suitable is that they offer no real resistance to a gun grab. In speaking with any number of open carriers their universal opinion is “that can’t happen to me”. In actuality it happens with far more frequency than a casual observer might think, and nationally recognized trainer Greg Ellifritz has been cataloging instances where it did happen for a number of years.

I recall seeing a young gentleman at the tire shop last summer. I think we were both having flats repaired. A stylish fellow with plenty of piercings and tats, he was dressed for the weather in skinny jeans and a cut off t-shirt, carrying a full sized Glock in an inside the waistband holster with no mechanical retention positioned at 12 o’clock between his navel and his junk. Anyone he came in contact with face to face could have disarmed him in an instant.

Such can be the state of open carry in Wyoming. And I would wager that young man has never given a moment of thought to the idea that he could be disarmed so easily.

That things happen was driven home for me again this morning as the video below crossed my feed while I had my first cup of coffee. This deputy was assigned to work the front desk at the substation and, for comfort, was wearing less gear than he would on patrol or as a bailiff. I guarantee that the deputy has been trained in defending against a gun grab and weapon retention. He may even be proficient at it. But, he was using a minimalist holster with at best a single level of retention. The young woman disarmed him with a swipe of her hand. The deputy didn’t have a chance to stop her. Two and a half seconds from when he opened the door was the rest of the young woman’s life. It could just as easily have been the rest of the deputy’s.

While it’s easy to say well, he’s a cop so he was a target anyway, what makes you think that you as an open carrier wouldn’t be in a similar situation? What makes you think that if you have never done a lick of training that you could resist better than the deputy did? If you think it can’t happen to you, click on the link two paragraphs up and read the page that opens, thoroughly. Follow all the embedded links. Then reach out to me and we can discuss.

If a law abiding person wants to open carry, and the laws where they live allow for it (or are silent like Nevada’s), then I cannot stop them. Nor would I try as it is their right. But if they are going to open carry I urge them strongly to do an honest, no BS, assessment of their individual risk profile and capabilities. I would recommend they seek out training and periodically put some work in. Both on firearms and on physical skills. I would suggest getting a copy of Gunfight by noted trainer Richard Nance and working through the techniques with a partner. I would also suggest seeking out force on force training with a competent instructor.

In short, don’t carry a handgun openly simply because you can. Unless, of course, you want to have a photo of yourself and your inept method of carry end up in some instructor’s slide deck under the caption ‘don’t be that guy’. Just like the photo below.

^{Photo Credits : Black Panther photo sourced at San Francisco Chronicle, Open Carry meme sourced at deviantart dot com, three guys with holsters sourced at blogforarizona dot net, gun in waistband sourced at pinterest}

^{Links to products and services are not affilate links. I derive no monetary gain from those links.}