Appropriate Open Carry of a Defensive Firearm

Here comes another important tip from the Personal Defense Network. I am unaware of any valid reason why someone should plan on going out of their house armed to defend themselves or others and choose to carry in this manner openly with no retention device whatsoever. It's really just kind of foolish. There are a lot of people who think that this is acceptable. This is okay.

Now ,let me throw the caveats out of the way. If there's a legal reason why you can't conceal a gun the only option you have is to carry a gun openly, great, but still not in this way behind your body behind where your hands normally move behind that point of the hip without any retention devices whatsoever. Now, a lot of people will tell you when they see this video or maybe in the comments below it. Show me one example of a gun grab. There was one very clear example of a gun grab recently in Florida which was very well-documented and really can be found pretty easily over the internet.

And what we're talking about is a lot of people who are advocates of open carry will tell you that no one has ever come up behind an open carrying person and tried to grab their gun. In fact ,someone did have their gun grabbed very clearly in a very hope high profile way. We also know that a lot of people have been confronted in public and have been asked, why are you carrying a gun? And it's led to arguments about, someone trying to maybe make up for some lack of toughness someone trying to be able to make up for some lack of security in their lives. Someone looking for a confrontation, someone trying to pose as being a lot tougher than they really are or really just trying to make a statement that, hey if you mess with me, you're really in for some bad trouble.

All of those things may be true or may not be true but just the simple fact that you could walk into a public environment and create a confrontation goes against everything that we really talk about, when we say responsibly armed, responsibly prepared to defend yourself or others in public. That's the reason you should be carrying a firearm to defend yourself or others, if you need to. You shouldn't be carrying a firearm to make a political statement, a good friend of mine and then fellow PDN contributor, Grant Cunningham made the observation that carrying openly just because you can, as a political statement is kind of ridiculous because you are now lobbying for something and being an activist for something that's already legal. You're not Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus in order to protest a wrongdoing. If you can legally do this you don't need to do it, to assert your right.

You can assert your right to carry firearms, and you can assert your pride about carrying firearms, and assert the fact that you're a responsible citizen, and you're a good normal member of the community who happens to own guns and think it's okay to carry guns by wearing a t-shirt that says so. You can get a tattoo. You can put a bumper sticker on your car. You can hand out flyers on the street corner. You can do a lot of things to raise awareness that don't actually bring a lethal device into play.

Carrying openly, just for a political statement, again, I think is reckless. Let's talk about appropriate open carry. There are times when carrying openly is going to be appropriate. I already talked about the legal issue. If you can only carry a gun openly, legally then that may be your thing.

But remember that if you choose to carry that gun openly you should still have a retention device and you should be doing so in a responsible way. Not in a way that is designed to elicit a response. We know that in the state of California people who chose to carry openly, even with an unloaded gun as the law did allow for, with video cameras trying to incite police confrontations and trying to challenge police to infringe on their rights to carry an unloaded gun, actually had that law changed. And it is now no longer legal to carry the gun openly loaded or unloaded in that state directly because of the eliciting of a response that people were doing. Wasting law enforcement officer's time, making a big deal on YouTube and telling themselves how awesome they were, actually ended up getting that right taken away.

And that's another one of the things that you'll hear, there's no way that this will create a negative reaction. It does. How do we carry appropriately then? What are we going to do in an open environment if we're going to carry? First of all, what's the environment?

If you're on horseback, if you're on a motorcycle out in the middle of the Western part of the United States, you're by yourself there's really no practical way to conceal a gun. Maybe you're going hiking through the wilderness. Maybe you're hunting. If you're hunting, obviously you're carrying openly. Here's that big rifle.

You're walking the Ridge lines, looking down in the Valley. You're glassing with binoculars scouting for game. You're obviously carrying an openly, that's appropriate. You're on a trap field. You're carrying a shotgun.

You're getting ready to walk up to the trap field and call pole, it's appropriate to carry openly. You're going to the convenience store. You're going to the grocery store. You're going to the shopping mall. It's probably not that appropriate, but if you find yourself in one of those situations where you have to, at least use an appropriate holster.

A holster like this one, which has a built in retention device is very easy to get your hands on and exactly the kind of holster at a minimum that you would want to use if you were going to be carrying openly so that if someone did come up behind you and try to grab the gun, and again, I don't recommend carrying behind you if you're open carrying anyway, even if I move this gun to here and someone were to get their hand in front of me, I'm distracted, I'm paying a clerk, I'm getting something out of my wallet. I'm making a phone call, checking the text messages. all the things that we all do in the real environment. At least this gives me an extra second or two to react, to respond, to be able to get my hand on that gun, to be able to address the threat address the person who's trying to take my gun. It's not just going to magically pop up out of the holster.

The retention device gives me the option of actually getting an extra second or two to respond appropriately. At the end of the day, the easiest way to carry a gun to defend yourself or others responsibly in a public environment, untuck the shirt, put on a jacket cover it up, and carry concealed, carry responsibly and carry a gun only to defend yourself or others, if you need to. Be sure to check out the Personal Defense Network for more important tips, just like that one.