Comment & Debate
Martin Albright. “Open carry is a bad idea.” The Truth About Guns. August 24th, 2010: “Open Carry is an invitation to a PR disaster. Lets be honest: not all gun owners are rational people. There are crazies out there. With guns. Advocating Open Carry. If one or two of those people push the limits of civilized behavior all firearms owners will get tagged as ‘crazy gun owners.’ That’s infuriating to those of us who consider ourselves to be mature and responsible citizens. But that’s the world we live in. Enough such incidents and the hammer will drop on some serious (read: Draconian) gun laws that will make the now-expired ‘assault weapons’ ban look like a pleasant memory.”
Robert Weisberg, a gun law expert and a criminal justice professor at Stanford University, described the open-carry activists as “a liability” for the N.R.A.[1]