And I guarantee you at least 1 of them will do something so monumentally stupid today that you wonder how the human race ever got past the whole wheel thing. Now, extrapolate that number to the millions, and you’re going to have a tremendous force of stupidity to deal with.
The reason I am bringing this up is because of what appears to me to be the raison d'être of the pro gunner argument against open carry, namely that all it takes is one idiot to Open Carry in some fashion that totally freaks out the masses and things go downhill from there.
You know what? Not only am I not saying someone won’t do something boneheadedly stupid while OC’ing, I’m practically guaranteeing you it will happen.
But it won’t set back gun rights.
How can I say this? It’s quite simple (because I’m going to copy and paste it from M.J. Mullenhour)
Anecdotal arguments are powerful, though weak. Weak because they depend on gross generalization of one occurrence to prove a proposition, ignoring all other conflicting occurrences and arguments. Powerful because people respond to real-life stories and are energized when they seize upon one story that “proves their point.”
M.J.’s article was brought on by a story that Breda linked to regarding two CCW holders who got in a shoot out over $10. It’s easy to seize on that one story and say “SEE!!! You said CCW holders were perfect angels that made the baby Jesus look like a filthy sinner!!!!!” especially if you’re an anti with a strong reality distortion generator.
The point is, in any given group, you’re going to have outliers who will do really, really stupid things. Vis-à-vis open carry, this means that somebody, somewhere is going to carry in a fashion and act in some way that you will not approve of and will end up making a scene. This incident will turn off a few people and probably somehow end up in a newspaper in order to shine as bad a light on Open Carry as possible.
There is nothing you can do about these people but worse yet, you shouldn't plan your movement in a vain attempt to somehow make it impossible for these people to harm you. Case in point, we had two idiot CCW holders get in a freakin' gun fight over $10, yet this does most emphatically not represent the vast majority of concealed permit holders. If, during the movement to popularize CCW, we sat back and said "Hey, someone might kill someone else over a parking spot and that would set us back really bad so we really shouldn't push for concealed weapons", we'd have never achieved the level of success we have had.
Don't let hypothetical outliers drive your decisions. Accept the fact that given a large enough sample, someone is eventually going to screw up but that it doesn't have to color the entire movement.