We've known for several years (see posts here, here, here, and here) that we were winning on the gun control battlefield. The expiration of the "assault weapon" ban and the Heller decision were just the two best known battles. There were thousands, perhaps millions if you count the wins of the hearts and minds of neighbors, friends, relatives, and co-workers.
I recognize open carry is on the path to victory but I figured it would be in the form of open carry at picnics, highway litter cleanup, and maybe as an organization at parades. People need to be desensitized to gun ownership. And concealed carry just doesn't help that much. When and how we do that desensitization can matter a great deal.
I've been open carrying in a few circumstances for a couple months now (here and here). There has been no obvious notice taken and certainly no adverse effects have occurred. Yet, had anyone asked my advice about open carry at a political protest about the nationalization of health care I would have told them I didn't see any good could come out of it. Obviously these people didn't ask for my advice or take similar advice from someone else.
In my opinion these people took a huge risk. They were throwing the dice in a game that affected tens of millions of people in this country. I'm not exactly risk adverse, after all I play with explosives for the fun of it and even have my children help make the explosives. But I wouldn't have taken the risk they did.
And what happened? It's as if we had been slowly advancing against the enemy. We were a little surprised to win the battle on carry in National Parks and we almost won a battle for nationwide reciprocity we couldn't have imagined even coming up for a vote had we thought about it after the election last November. But the enemy was still putting up resistance and we thought they were still formidable opponents. Then they collapsed. The White House (or Red Shed as a commenter recently called it) said it was no big deal to open carry. Public opinion is affected by statements from the White House. Having the most anti-gun administration in U.S. history say it's no big deal to open carry is huge.
We knew recent poll results showed us winning. But I thought that would take time to translate into our enemies fleeing before us. But it appears now that the brave actions of a few open carry advocates broke through the empty shell of the anti-gun organizations and there are going to be a lot of Sad Pandas tonight and people looking at their bottles of cheap rum.
Now, more than ever, we have a chance to push these bigots into political extinction. When they are on the run they have their backs to us and cannot organize and put up effective resistance. We need to acquire the proper state of mind and pound them as hard as we can as fast as we can. There are still pockets of resistance in New Jersey, Chicago, California, etc. but we may have just won the war.
Update: This post just got linked to by Glenn Reynolds. I would like to suggest my new visitors also look at some of my other posts:
Thanks visiting.