I have to join Steve from the Firearms Blog in suggesting that this isn’t the best way to help the public image of gun shows. We’ve spent a lot of effort over the years to bring this issue out of the shadows and into the mainstream. When I first started going to gun shows back in the late 80s, early 90s, it was pretty much your stereotypical middle aged white males, and some fathers would bring their boys. Today I see mom and families going, sons along with daughters. This didn’t happen by magic. It was a deliberate cultural struggle to make gun shows seem mainstream to your average person, despite a huge effort by anti-gunners to make them seem shadowy. Guys who do crap like this don’t help things. In fact, they help Bloomberg.
Epic Troll, But Not Helping
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/04/26/txmgo-response-to-tfb-reagarding-the-sale-of-pipebombs/
You’re “gun shamingâ€.
Whether it’s disapproval of concealed carry, open carry, rifle carry, suppressor use, machine gun use, SBR use, SBS use, drawing from a holster at an indoor range, rifle drills, handgun drills or insert your particular pet peeve here; TXMGO appears to have followed the law but met with some condescending disapproval from within our own community.
THIS is why candidates like Hillary Clinton have so much success because within our own community we snipe and crab at one another because we disapprove. I think David Codrea has taken to calling this “Otheringâ€.
Plus a few points for style and making a graphic point about the monumental stupidity of the NFA; which stupidity I’ve been known to snark about. Minus several hundred for “phrasing.”
From a strictly neutral point of view, he could have put an “80% Sten Gun receiver for sale” sign on it; but it wouldn’t have had the impact on the layman. But freaking the mundanes isn’t a winning strategy.
Same issue some of you have with open carriers. STOP TRYING TO PLACATE the opposition. They will never be satisfied. If it wasn’t for purposeful agitators in various venues, we’d still be talking about how to combat handgun bans. You may not want to be the fringe, but it’s folks at the fringe who push the envelope and create the new normal. That new normal now includes a majority of the states being shall-issue, silencers being almost universally accepted and on the rise, and fighting back against stupid AWBs, since handgun bans are now off the table. In the future, I hope the new normal includes national reciprocity, suppressors available as mere 4473 items, and a common-use decision concerning AR-15s. You may not want to push the envelope, but at least respect those who do.
It’s not about placating the opposition, it’s about not making more opposition. If people are convinced gun ownership is mainstream, and gun owners pretty much normal people, they are considerably less likely to push back when we push the envelope.
Anti-gun folks do not have the votes themselves to affect meaningful change on their own. Pro-gun people don’t either. The way we’ve won is to teach politicians that they can placate a small, but very vocal and organized constituency without incurring any risk from other constituencies they need to get re-elected. We outnumber the anti-gunners by a large margin, but we still need the acquiescence of a lot of non-gun people in order to keep winning.
I don’t think anyone who reads this blog is really against you open carrying. I don’t think its the smartest way to carry, but go ahead. Go about your normal day carrying a holstered gun. Run errands, etc.
But don’t have your open carry meetings at the local Starbucks, or carry your AR15 into a Mcdonalds while claiming to “educate” the masses. You are just seeking attention for yourself, not any cause.
The notion that it desensitizes people to guns is true in the same way that gay people in all entertainment has done so. But you can too far; carrying an AR-15 into a restaurant works as well as two guys having sex in the middle of the street. It startles and disgusts because it goes too far, too fast.
It gets you attention, but so does walking around naked, or taking a dump in the middle of the street. Same “point” could have been made with boxes of nails, pipe, and a can of smokeless powder, and a note “assembly by idiot required.”