My excellent friend and excellent photographer Steve LaBadessa has a photo essay featured in Time magazine about open carry gun law advocates in California:
It’s interesting that it’s a Barney Fife situation; you have to keep your bullets in your pockets until the little Andy Taylor in your head tells you it’s OK to get operational. I didn’t realize that was the case. For all the digital ink spilled on the subject, you’d think that tidbit would have found its way to my eyeballs. But then, you don’t hear much sense about the issue one way or the other about the topic.
I must admit it’s a bit jarring to see people walking around with a holster like that. Not particularly scary, just a little odd. Maybe I got blase while working construction for the majority of my life. We were all carrying around things that could maim or kill you pretty much all the time. Which would send you scurrying off a subway car faster: a guy with a pistol in a holster, or a guy carrying a chainsaw?
People disarmed themselves in the not too distant past. It wasn’t laws that did it, particularly. Guns became mostly superfluous in most places outside a farm or a city with the crime rate through the roof, so people stopped having them around. People stopped having outhouses when indoor plumbing got going, too. The unusual nature of seeing people out and about with guns again is more a signal that many average persons don’t think guns are superfluous any more, and they don’t think the government’s first impulse is to protect them from harm any longer, so they’re doing it themselves.
The question of whether to let people carry guns is plenty argued over. Better to ask why they want to. The registered nurse in the essay doesn’t look like Annie Oakley to me; maybe she just knows something we don’t about being out in the world with a bag full of legal drugs lots of people would kill her over.
8 Responses
"But then, you don't hear much sense about the issue one way or the other about the topic. "
The Blogosphere defined (Somewhat sardonically).
Present company excepted, of course.
Yes indeed, California allows open carry of (unloaded) firearms, which has led to a spate of advocates carrying in provocative situations.
Unloaded seems stupid, but the "awareness-raising" aspect of these demonstrations has definitely stirred up some stuff among the gun-fearers.
As per nurses carrying, check this out:
http://xavierthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/05/from-archives-standing-on-x.html
This guy has been a public-health nurse for a long time, and many of his stories are sobering, to say the least.
See anti-Saldana open carrty ban bill video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgJmg1lVQ7M
My adopted second home in Ca has been having rather a to do about this lately, as a supposedly gun fearing Brit I'm quite comfortable with it.
Well, as a nurse and a supporter of the Second Amendment,here's my take on the subject.
The nurse pictured is evidently a home healthcare/hospice sort. As such she's required to go into areas that may be quite dodgy, so I can definitely see the rationale for carrying.
However, it may scare/make vulnerable clients uncomfortable or intimidated to see their nurse carrying a weapon. Counterproductive to the therapeutic relationship.
In that situation, I would opt for concealed carry and make my political statement on my own time.
Not sure what the permit requirements are in CA tho. Maybe too onerous. In that case I would carry concealed anyway.
Is that author's name the French version of 'bad-ass'?
Hi Ruth Anne- Always love to see your smiling face.
His name has something to do with the word "abbess." Like a mother superior. It denotes a kinda hospitality in Italian, I think.
The constant presence of holsters – and soldiers – was initially jarring when we moved to Israel.
Now we look at soldiers and think "someone's kids" and don't give handguns a second thought.