Armed and Dangerous

What happens when our writer struts around town with a pistol on his hip? He finds out that open-carry laws are putting

an uncomfortable new spin on gun control

T

WO WHITE GUYS, scruffy beards, nondescript, packing heat. "Butch and Sundance," he says. I say, "Wyatt and Doc." He's Wyatt—somber, righteous, a straight arrow. I'm Doc—a romantic

consumptive reeking of Southern charm.

My fantasy. That's the thing about packing heat openly in public. It's all about fantasy. Butch, Sundance, Wyatt, Doc. Gary Cooper in High Noon. The fair maiden rescued from the lech. Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. Righteous vengeance in a crowded saloon. Clint, again, in Pale Rider. The belea­guered prospector saved from the evil banker on a dusty street under a blazing sun. "Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." Wyatt and Doc, an odd couple, upholding the law at the O.K. Corral, the law, incongruously, all about gun control.

Packing heat openly on city streets, called "open carry"— as opposed to "concealed carry," packing heat hidden by a jacket or shirt, the way I do almost every day, in a holster built into my leather shoulder bag—is all the rage these days among the Caspar Milquetoast set, average white guys who have never been victims of a crime, never really broken the law, never had the need to draw their guns in anger or defense, self or otherwise, and yet are adamant about their right to do something even if it makes no real sense to anyone except themselves. They carry because they can. It's their right under the Second Amendment of the Constitution (their interpretation anyway): "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Their mantra: "A right unexercised is a right lost." Gun control groups including the Brady Cam­paign to Prevent Gun Violence, of course, disagree with pro-gun advocates about the meaning of the amendment. Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Campaign, once went even further, writing that self-defense is "not a federally guaranteed constitutional right."

So on this sunny spring afternoon, Jerry Henry of GeorgiaCarry.org and I are walking the streets of Fair-burn, Peachtree City and Newnan, small towns south of Atlanta, stopping at Starbucks, Walmart, Home Depot and the Longhorn Steakhouse with our pistols strapped to our sides in leather holsters. Jerry is short and round, with a shaved head and a Mephistophelian goatee, and still he doesn't look menacing. He's a blacksmith in Fairburn. His daughter gives riding lessons at his ranch. Jerry is carrying a 1911 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol in a Galco paddle hol­ster on his hip. It's the gun of choice for open-carry guys. The 1911 was designed in the early 1900s by John Moses Browning, the son of a gunsmith from Ogden, Utah. The 1911 was the U.S. military's sidearm of choice for more than 70 years, through two world wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam war, until it was replaced in 1985 by the Beretta 92 nine-millimeter, an Italian gun. "The Beretta doesn't have the stopping power of the 1911," Jerry says, unless it's loaded with exotic and finicky hollow-point bul­lets. The 1911 doesn't need hollow-points. Its aficionados have a saying: "They all fall with hardball." It's a gun for the kind of guys who have madk in amkrica bumper stickers on their Ford F-150 trucks that were made in Canada or Mexico. Open carry is more about what goes on in the minds of open-carry guys than what goes on in reality. It's not about drawing a gun to stop a robbery, rape or murder or about a shoot-out in a diner a la Dirty Harry, blasting the bad guys through a plate-glass window. It's about the

fantasies of like-minded men who see themselves as root­ed in America's heroic past, the O.K. Corral, the Battle of the Bulge, even if they weren't part of that past. Hence the 1911, an American gun. "The 1911 protected Ameri­can troops for almost 100 years," says Jerry. I ask him why the military switched to the nine-millimeter Beretta. "Who knows why our government does anything?" he replies.

I'm tall, with a full beard and long, swept-back hair like a French diplomat's. I'm carrying a CZ-85 nine-millimeter Czech Republic military semiautomatic pistol in a leather holster from South Africa. During the Cold War, the Czechs supplied CZs to a host of terrorists—the Red Brigade, the IRA, the PLO—so they could wreak havoc on Western Europe; they also supplied them to South Africa because Western Europe and the United States were boycotting its apartheid policies. My CZ is loaded with 16 Corbon hollow-point bullets; Jerry's 1911 is loaded with eight. I am carrying it high on my hip for a quicker draw. Who am I going to shoot today?

Jerry and I are standing in line with our Cokes at a conve­nience store in Palmetto, Georgia. The white guy behind us looks down at our guns and steps back. The black guy with dreads in front of us glances over his shoulder at our guns, then gets out of line and leaves. I feel foolish with my exposed CZ-85 on my hip. Not threatening or protective or invincible. Like I'm making a meaningless statement about something no one else understands. What's the point of a statement no one gets? When I carry my CZ in my carry bag, concealed, it feels natural. I'm seldom conscious of even carrying a gun. I am certainly not conscious of my gun disturbing people around me, as I am now.

The pretty woman behind the cash register takes our money. She kids with Jerry but seems oblivious to his gun until I ask her about it. "Doesn't bother me," she says. "My husband carries a gun." Jerry says a lot of businesses like it when he's in the place open-carrying. One owner said, "Looks like nothing's going on here for a while." Open-carry guys' fantasies: They're protecting the weak and the inno­cent, the timid hardware store owner, the old maid with the parasol, the bullied young boy. Some people, however, are not so understanding. One woman looked at Jerry's gun and said, "What are you afraid of?" Jerry said, "I'm not afraid of anything, ma'am. I got a gun." He subscribes to that old adage from the movie True Romance. Going into a drug deal, Christian Slater puts a .357 Magnum in his belt and says, "It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it." (Aphorisms are (continued on page 123)

ARMED

(continued from page 62) big with the open-carry set. They're what passes for truth.)

Like most open-carry guys, I have never drawn my gun in defense during a violent crime, though I did get my first gun and my concealed-weapon permit in Fort Lau-derdale because of a crime. My wife and I were restoring an old house in a seedy neighborhood 20 years ago when our car was broken into. We called the cops. The cop who arrived looked around and said, "Only an asshole would live in this neighborhood without a gun." Even cops, it seems, are in favor of law-abiding citizens having guns, by a margin of almost three to one. They know that a number of courts have ruled the

public has no inher­ent right to expect the police to protect them from crimes. As gun advocates put it, "When seconds count, the police are minutes away."

After the cop left, we went to the Dixie Gun Range, shot a few nine-millimeters, bought two, took a CWP course, went to the police station, were fingerprinted and had our prints sent to the FBI. Then we applied for our concealed-weapon per­mits. Florida was one of the first states to issue CWPs, in 1987. Since then all but a few states have passed some form of concealed- or open-carry laws, most of them with some restric­tions. Such permits are denied convicted felons, domestic abus-ers, addicts, alcoholics and people with men­tal problems.

Once Florida passed its CWP law and other states fol­lowed suit, the Brady

Campaign and other anti-gun groups imme­diately predicted bloodbaths on city streets from itchy-fingered gun toters. But accord­ing to separate studies by John Lott, then a fellow at the University of Chicago, and Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, just the opposite occurred. Gun violence and serious crimes decreased in those states that allowed their citizens to be armed. In five years Florida's murder rate dropped 23 percent. In all states with CWP laws, murders decreased 8.5 percent. And as far as CWP holders being trigger-happy gunslingers, well, only 167 of the 1.7 million CWPs Florida has issued since 1987 have been revoked. It seems that people who will­ingly send their fingerprints to the FBI are disinclined to commit gun crimes. Nor are they inclined to brandish their guns as an

act of bravado or even to stop crimes from being committed. However, two such prom­inent instances occurred in south Florida after the passage of the CWP law. A barmaid was accosted in the parking lot of her condo late at night by a man pointing a gun at her. She quickly turned over her purse and her car keys, but when he had another thought and told her to get into her car with him, she pulled her .38 snub-nosed revolver from the back of her jeans and shot him between the eyes. Another man, in his 70s but very fit and muscular, was eating dinner at a Subway restaurant when two robbers entered, wav­ing guns. They took the customers' wallets, then—another afterthought—began to herd them toward the bathroom. That's when the 71-year-old reached behind his back, pulled out his .45 caliber handgun and shot

i In- robbers, killing one. Neither the man nor the woman was charged with a crime. Instead, they were both hailed as heroes by the police and south Floridians.

Until a few years ago, Florida's law made it legal for CWP holders to use a gun to stop a violent crime against themselves or others only if they had no chance to flee. But the law was amended. It became the Stand Your Ground law, and essentially it eliminated a person's responsibility to flee. Anti-gunners called it the Kill Bill. It is much in the news these days, ever since George Zimmerman, a Hispanic neighborhood watch captain, shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman initially avoided arrest because of the Stand Your Ground law, which is meant to pro­tect someone whose life is endangered by

an unprovoked attack. There is a good rea­son the law now allows a person to use lethal force in self-defense without the obligation to flee. Many such innocent people are old, infirm or just not physically fit and would not be able to outrun a younger, fitter thug, one possibly trying to shoot or stab them. The worst thing a person can do is turn his or her back on an attacker. But the question in any Stand Your Ground case is, Who is acting unlawfully? For instance, even if Zim­merman aggressively confronted Martin first but did so within the letter of the law, he would be considered an innocent bystander if Martin responded by attacking him.

We go outside and get in Jerry's big Ford F-350 four-door dually truck with the horse-

shoeing rig on back. He says, "One time a woman asked me if she could borrow my gun. She said, 'I wanna use it on this guy's been stalk­ing me.' I declined." Jerry drives through rolling fields toward a shopping mall and the Longhorn res­taurant. He tells me about a state repre­sentative who wanted to ban the sale of guns near a school because "it was in a pretty tough neigh­borhood." Jerry says, "Then you need more guns, not less." He says that one of the most crime-free cities in Georgia is Kenne-saw, where the town council passed an ordinance some years back requiring every household to have a gun. If people didn't want a gun, they had to get an exemption from city hall.

Jerry had little his­tory with guns until a few years ago. As a boy growing up in

the tiny Texas farm town of Bells, he never hunted with his father the way a lot of the other country boys did. He never really had firearms until he was a grown man and his brother convinced him to go hunting deer with him. "I bought a rifle and hunted for three or four years," Jerry says, "but I quit. It's no sport if they can't shoot back. But I did enjoy the camaraderie of hunting— you know, sitting around the campfire at night with the guys." When Jerry began carrying his 1911a few years ago, it wasn't because he'd had any experiences with crime. It was just that he had a perception that "the world was a lot rougher today, with no respect for life like when I was a kid." This is a common thought among open-carry guys, a romantic yearning for a more innocent past that may or may not

have existed. Jerry joined GeorgiaCarry .org and began carrying his 1911 openly. He carries concealed only on rare occasions— winter weather, dinner at friends' homes. "Some friends don't like it," he says. "Some it don't bother because they know I'm not totally crazy." He even carries openly to his chiropractor, who says each time, "I see you got the same old gun, Jerry."

Jerry was "very much on edge" and extremely conscious of his gun on his hip until he learned to carry it "like it belongs there, so people don't question me." He even carries in his house. His wife doesn't mind. When Jerry first started carrying, she noticed "how civil everyone is to you now." Jerry told her, "Yeah, and panhandlers don't bother me anymore either."

Jerry says he carries openly because "if I walk in some place and a bad guy sees me, he'll leave." Then he adds, "Look at me. Do I look tough? I've got a bad back, I can't run or fight, and I'm not going to take an ass whipping. There's crime everywhere."

I have carried a concealed weapon for almost 20 years, as has my wife, and we have had only two gun incidents between us. In the 1990s I went to the airport to meet a friend, forgot that my gun was in my carry bag and was arrested at the X-ray detector by two Broward County sheriffs. I spent 12 hours in a felony tank, where the other felons couldn't have been nicer to me once they found out that I was in the slammer for a gun crime. Eventually, the charge against me was dropped, adjudica­tion withheld and my gun returned to me, though the whole sordid episode cost me $3,000 in legal fees.

Another time, my wife, Susie, was return­ing to her car at the far end of the mall parking lot when she saw three seedy-looking men walking quickly toward her. She turned and faced them, reached into her handbag and pulled up her nine-millimeter until it was halfway out, and the three men ran off.

I carry a gun because, like most gun advo­cates, I'm determined never to become a victim. I often drive late at night while researching a story. I have no intention of getting stuck with a flat tire on some dark two-lane blacktop without protection. It's a mind-set a lot of people who are not from the South or West don't understand, the concept that an armed society is a polite society.

What protects law-abiding citizens from crimes in CWP states is not just their guns but the perception among bad guys that anyone might have a gun. It's a deterrent, like nuclear missiles during the Cold War. A nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was avoided precisely because both sides had nuclear weapons. Liberal anti-gunners in cities like New York and L.A. are loath to admit this. Such cities have restric­tive gun laws, so only the bad guys in those cities carry guns. Therefore, their citizens' perception of guns is always negative. This fact was driven home to me when I wrote a story about Steve Carlton, the Hall of Fame pitcher and survivalist who had many guns buried around his Durango, Colorado mountain retreat. Carlton and I talked a lot about guns. I wrote about those conver­sations, and when the story was published it was somewhat controversial. The Today show taped an interview with me. I was prepared for the most obvious question. "And do you

carry a gun?" the interviewer asked. I said yes. She asked why. I said, "Because it's my constitutional right, just like your right to vote." Needless to say, my response to that question was not aired.

Jerry and I have lunch at the Longhorn. Nobody much notices our guns as we walk to our table, except the hostess, who says nothing. We order from our waitress, a big, pretty woman named Shannon. There's a table of eight off to our left, a mother and father with their grown children, eating and laughing, oblivious to us.

Jerry says open-carry guys are a frater­nity of sorts, like the Shriners but without the fezzes and tiny cars, men of various ages and backgrounds with one common inter­est. "We get together for carry lunches," says Jerry. "But we call the restaurant owner first to see if he has a problem with 10 guys carrying guns openly." (Although it is legal in Georgia and 30-odd other states to carry openly, some areas are off-limits: federal buildings, courthouses, schools, public buildings, churches, bars, sports events and any business that has a sign prohibiting guns. A violation of that sign is a criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, not a weapons felony.) At their lunches open-carry guys drink sweet tea and tell horror stories about crimes—an old lady robbed in a parking lot—but, curiously, not about crimes from their personal experience. Jerry says, "One of our members did have some guys com­ing toward him in a threatening way until they saw his gun and left."

Then there's the Waffle House story. Open-carry guys like to tell the Waffle House story. A couple of them were sitting in a Waffle House having breakfast when a man came in to case the joint. The man saw them, then went back to his buddies in the parking lot and told them to drive around until the two open-carry guys left. But before they did, a cop in a cruiser noticed the crew in their car acting suspiciously. He searched their car, found ski masks and shotguns and arrested them.

But mostly, Jerry says, "carry guys just compare their guns—you know, 'Mine's nicer than yours'"—like teenage boys com­paring their souped-up cars at a drive-in or farmers around a cracker barrel bragging about the size of their tomatoes.

Open-carry advocacy is a relatively new phenomenon. It became a prominent issue in July 2004 after Virginia passed a law mandating that localities could not regulate anything firearm-related except for discharge. Since Virginia state law had never addressed open carry one way or the other, this meant it was now allowed across the entire state. After that, gun advocates across the country searched the laws and discovered more than 30 states had allowed open carry for years. A majority of those laws harked back to the 18th century, when most men carried long rifles for self-defense and hunting. But they made no distinction between long rifles and semiautomatic pis­tols. Since the Virginia mandate, open-carry advocates have been pushing the envelope

of their states' laws at coffee shops in Wash­ington and restaurants in California and in a host of other states. Since this is a new phenomenon, there are no studies yet to determine whether open carry deters or causes crime, as there are with concealed carry. Of course gun control advocates warned that Virginia's open-carry law would have everybody, as Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, put it, "packing heat and ready to engage in a shoot-out at the slightest provocation." Both sides in the gun debate, it seems, are determined to shoot themselves in the foot at the slightest provocation. Which is why they have done dueling studies, each trying to destroy the other's credibility.

John Lott, who has been called "the gun crowd's guru" by Newsweek, was criticized

by anti-gunners for his methodology, but when these critics performed their own research, their results weren't much differ­ent from his. At best, they claimed that the decrease in violent crimes in CWP states was not as great as Lott said, but even they had to admit that the "massive bloodbath [gun oppo­nents] feared" never happened. Some anti-gunners, like Kleck, even praised Lott's work. In his own research, Kleck came up with num­bers similar to Lott's. He discovered that more than 2.5 mil­lion violent crimes are avoided each year by law-abiding citizens brandishing guns at attackers. In fact, when Kleck began his research, he told me he expected to find that violent crimes would increase with the advent of Florida's CWP law. He told me he was shocked at the

results of his own study. As for Lott's, it has been praised by John O. McGinnis, a pro­fessor at Northwestern University School of Law, and the late Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate, who said, John Lott has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial pub­lic policy issues."

During lunch Jerry says that ordinary-looking "white guys carrying openly are less threatening than younger black guys carrying openly. Hell, we could be cops. In DeKalb County blacks carrying openly don't fare too well. The cops tackle them first and take their guns away." There is an element of racism in the perception of open-carry guys. If blacks carried openly in south L.A. or Harlem, cops would immedi­ately perceive them as a threat and throw them in the slammer, no questions asked.

Jerry admits this is true: "Every gun control law ever written was for a particular group. During Reconstruction in the South, gun control laws were intended to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. Gun control is what the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was all about: Keep guns out of the hands of the Ike Clanton gang."

I get up to go to the bathroom. As I pass the table of eight, a girl in her 20s looks up, her eyes fixed on my gun, and I can see a look of apprehension in her eyes. In the men's room I stand at the urinal. I have to unbuckle my belt and hold my heavy gun with one hand while trying to keep my pants from falling to my ankles with the other. When I start to pee, my gun begins to slip down my leg. I grab at it with both hands and piss down my pants leg. My pants leg

is soaking wet. I dab at it with paper tow­els. It helps only a little. So I go over to the hand dryer, raise my leg as high as I can and blow-dry my pants. A guy walks in and stops. He stares at me straddling the dryer like I'm trying to hump it. He shakes his head and mutters, 'Jesus, they're everywhere," and leaves.

When I get back to Jerry and tell him what happened, he laughs and says, "Tak­ing a piss is the hardest part of carrying a gun on your hip."

I pay our bill, but before the waitress leaves, I ask her if she had any problem with our guns openly displayed. Shannon says, "I didn't bat an eyelash. I never heard a cus­tomer complain. My father and grandfather are lifetime NRA members." Then she adds, "It's our constitutional right. Guns don't

kill people, people do." Jerry hands her his GeorgiaCarry.org card and says, "You might want to join." Shannon looks at it and says, "I just might."

GeorgiaCarry.org is similar to a national organization called OpenCarry.org, founded in 2004 by Mike Stollenwerk and John Pierce. Pierce is 44, married with three kids. He's a software engineer and newly minted law-school graduate who grew up in a "very, very rural part of southwestern Virginia," he tells me. "It was the kind of little town where no one locked their doors and everyone had 10 guns in the house. I never realized there was such a thing as gun control until I went to college." Pierce has been an NRA mem­ber since his 20s. He got his Virginia CWP

in 1998 and began to carry openly in 2004. "People weren't aware of open-carry rights until the past few years," he says.

Like most open-carry guys, Pierce has never been the victim of a crime in the United States. (A mugger once robbed him, with a knife, when he visited Lon­don.) The only time he has drawn his gun was to shoot a rac­coon that was killing his chickens. "I don't fit the anti-gunners' stereotype," he says. "I'm not very macho. I'm classically liberal. I'm pro-immigration and pro-gay rights. We are not a politi­cal movement like the Tea Party. We have only one issue. Our lifestyle is being attacked when we are not allowed to carry guns openly. If we could, we'd go away. I'd gladly have my taxes doubled if every state let every law-abiding citizen carry

openly without government permission. We want to normalize open carry."

Pierce says there are two negatives to concealed carry: The bad guys don't know who has a gun, and concealed carry is con­sidered a privilege granted by the state. Virginia, unlike Georgia, does not require its citizens to have a permit to carry openly, though it does require a CWP to carry con­cealed. Pierce thinks carrying openly is more a deterrent to crime than concealed carry is. He points, as proof, to the time one OpenCarry.org member was in a bank. He was making a transaction with a teller when he saw her eyes suddenly get wide. He turned to see what was terrifying her. A man in a ski mask had run into the bank, then skidded to a halt when he saw the open-carry guy's gun and ran back out.

Before I get off the phone with Pierce, he makes a point of telling me, "You have to understand, I am a single-issue guy. This issue is the focus of my ideological life."

After lunch Jerry and I wander around Walmart for a while. We buy some ammo from a friendly saleswoman. I try to impress her. I make a big deal of checking the veloc­ity of each box of bullets, showing off, being gun cool—what most men want, an exper­tise of their own that separates them from the placid herd. Then we go to the check­out line. The guy behind us sees our guns and moves to another line. "Walmart is a gun-friendly place," says Jerry. Like Home Depot and Best Buy and Starbucks. "I'm working on a list of gun-friendly places for GeorgiaCarry.org," he says. "Atlanta is a tough place to open carry because there are schools everywhere. You could be walking through a school zone and not even know it and get arrested." Georgia's carry laws are somewhat schizophrenic. The state leg­islature passed a law allowing open carry in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, so people will be able to carry a pis­tol openly on their hip but will have to take their shoes off to prove they don't have a hid­den weapon. In fact, open carry is allowed in many places in Georgia where people con­gregate, such as on Marta, Atlanta's mass transit system. However, it is against the law to eat on a Marta subway train.

The police chief of Fairburn is James McCarthy. "I'm not a typical police chief," he says. "I'm a bigger gun nut than most police chiefs." McCarthy respects open-

carry guys, of whom he says, "I've never had a complaint. I'm not opposed to open carry. I just think they're inviting trouble. They could be perceived as guys looking for trouble, which is not true. I think the more armed decent citizens we have, the better it is. If everybody wore a gun, it wouldn't matter." But since everybody doesn't wear a gun openly, he says, all open-carry guys are doing is inviting unwanted scrutiny. "Why tell everyone you have a gun?" he says. "Someone might just want to shoot your ass. But I never heard a negative comment about open-carry guys. I suppose it could be a deterrent if you already know some­body's armed."

McCarthy says that in his 30 years as an officer, he has never had a problem with a permitted gun carrier. In fact, he can only recall hearing about one crime involving a legally permitted weapon, and that involved a machine gun. Then he says to me, "Did you ever shoot a machine gun with a suppres­sor?" I say no. He says, "Man, machine guns are cool. The next time you come to Fair-burn, let me know. I'll take you out shooting machine guns." I tell him I'd like that.

Jerry and I are taking a walk in the hot sun around the square in Newnan on a sleepy, uneventful day. A yuppie couple at an outdoor table at the Redneck Gourmet stare at us and our exposed guns, whis­per to each other, then go back to their food. Jerry's back is beginning to bother him. All those horses he's shod, bending over, his back aching. So we find a bench in the shade and sit down. I'm tired too, and drained from all the tension. Jerry says open-carry guys just want to go through

an uneventful day. For them, maybe. But not for others. Not for me. This day has been anything but uneventful for me. All day I've felt this unbearable pressure while wandering around with my gun exposed, looking everywhere for disapproval or fear or a challenge or maybe just a police offi­cer who doesn't give a shit about the Second Amendment and was going to run us in just for the hell of it to teach us a lesson.

Jerry says, "If the laws were changed tomorrow, we'd all just go back to what we been doing. OpenCarry.org probably would no longer exist. We're not like the NRA. If the NRA doesn't have gun control opposition, there's no way Wayne LaPierre [executive vice president of the NRA] would be getting that huge salary each year to fight gun control. The NRA needs an enemy. We don't. We're independent from the NRA. They don't listen to us." In fact, the NRA is ambivalent toward open carry. The organi­zation tries not to criticize it, but it doesn't like the unwanted attention it draws to the NRA agenda. Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, calls open carry "flaunting" because "it scares people." Open-carry advocates have scared people by walking around Salt Lake City Inter­national Airport with their guns. They've scared people on picnic outings at Silverdale Waterfront Park in Washington state. But mostly they have scared people by openly carrying guns at venues where President Obama was speaking. On August 11, 2009 William Kostric took his loaded handgun to a town hall meeting hosted by Obama in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the watchful eyes of the Secret Service. On August 16, 2009 about a dozen people car­ried openly outside the Phoenix Convention Center, where Obama was speaking. Kostric carried a sign that read it's time to water the free of liberty. What he left off the sign were the last words of that sentence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote more than 200 years ago: "with the blood of patri­ots and tyrants." Which is why open-carry advocates have been called a "liability" to the NRA and a "wild card." OpenCarry.org is the redheaded stepchild of the NRA. It's an organization that doesn't police itself, doesn't do background checks on its mem­bers, doesn't separate the ordinary, peaceful citizens like Jerry Henry from the lunatic fringe who make threats about the blood of tyrants. That lunatic minority taints everyone who open carries in a way that concealed carriers aren't tainted. CWP hold­ers are screened by their local police and the FBI, which solidifies their law-abiding-citizen bona fides. I feel righteous when I carry concealed, but I feel a little bit dan­gerous when I carry openly.

Jerry and I get back to his ranch outside of Fairburn late in the afternoon. His wife, daughter, granddaughter, sister and a neigh­bor woman are feeding the horses. Jerry introduces me to the women. I say, "How can you handle all these women, Jerry?" The women laugh. Jerry says, "I know how to handle women." His wife says, "Yeah, that's why he has to carry a gun, because he can't handle us."