imported post
It was a pretty good get together in Lynnwood, met up with jchen012 and joeroket at Wilcox Park. After talking with a few moments, and looking at some of my own handiwork, we all went to the
The Rock, Wood Fired Pizza. jchen012 also open carried for the first time, due to some friendly peer pressure from me.
No bother at all. The masses were not screaming and running away. Good quesadillas.
We spoke about many subjects, not just open carry. Transportation issues. It was a pretty good gather that lasted about 3 hours.
I then went down to Tacoma to meet up with compmanio365. We met at Bulls Eye Range, but I arrived first and spoke with the Range Officer named Ronnie. What's interesting about the conversation was that he was under the impression that it was legal to open carry until someone was alarmed. Needless to say I dispelled that, he made copies of the Federal Way bulletin and I gave him the link.
compmanio arrived sometime during this conversation and both of us offered more or our perspectives.
Though he (Ronnie) dressed with what I would call your typical 22 year old urban wear wear (long t-shirt, jeans, sneakers). He also wasn't white (I won't guess as to his ethnicity) which means that he's likely treated with a little more suspicion by the public and by law enforcement in general. He says he prefers concealed carry, because he doesn't want anyone to know he's carrying, but I believe he's gotten a newfound respect for open carry. I think with enough open carry in Pierce County he may do it. He also made one interesting observation:
If someone were dressed in a suit, an 80 year old woman sees that person open carry, they're likely to see an undercover cop. I usually wear black denim and similarly colored shirts, so that's the same with me.
However, Ronnie would likely get a phone call because he looks somewhat like a "thug", even though he probably is a lot more law abiding than a "thug" and can shoot better. I've seen some of his target groupings.
The entire conversation brought home something to think about, which was the idea of racial profiling and clothing profiling. I am willing to bet that the "Man with a gun" calls are likely to be higher with a person who is not white than someone like myself, compmanio, and joeroket. Which is quite unfortunate.
This is one of the reasons why I think it's even more important to get this education campaign squared away, even with the dispatchers who may send out police. The clothes one's wear should not bear onto whether or not someone can open carry. I can tell Ronnie won't open carry for the factors I named above. To me, that's wrong and needs to be addressed.
That being said, myself and compmanio went down into the gun store and I oogled over the guns there. I was going to make a payment towards a gun on layaway that I had literally forgotten about. They still had it in inventory, but they were not happy with it being in layaway for 7 months.
Starting 4/1/2007, they put in a policy stating that anyone who leaves the gun on layaway for more than 45 days without paying the full cost, so when I tried to pay a payment of $100 towards the remaining balance, they were not pleased. They wanted me to pay the entire thing right then. So, faced with the choice of losing most of the $200 I already paid into it before, I decided to just buck it up and pay for the whole thing.
Now one gun richer, heh heh.
-Lonnie
