Open Carry is NOT the Answer

Even in supposedly gun-free Europe, guns are easy to get for anyone who meets the price, as the people of Paris recently discovered to their misfortune.  In America, there are so many hunters who spend so much money on hunting licenses and other equipment that the "long guns" as used in the recent San Bernardino shooting are even easier to get.

Regardless of the painful fact that bad guys have no trouble getting all the guns they want, the global knee-jerk response to the Paris terrorist attacks suggests that our leaders fear that they've made it too hard for terrorists, drug dealers, and other malefactors to get their hands on machine guns.  Unlike their solutions to most other problems, they've taken immediate, highly effective action to make it a lot easier for bad guys to get high-end guns while French leaders and Mr. Obama are talking about tightening restrictions on law-abiding gun owners.

Just look at these convenient walking gun stores!  Limited selection, but no cash needed, and no background check.  Just knock off the cop, the gun's yours, and you get extra points from Allah for killing another infidel!

Walking sentry duty in airports or subway stations is going to get real old real fast.  People get careless when boredom sets in.  What if one of the jihadists is a pretty girl who doesn't mind dressing provocatively to support the cause?  She can walk up to a mobile gun store, ask for directions, and drop her purse.  Her confederate shoves a knife through the cop's spine, and they make off with the artillery.  They can practice on drunks in back alleys until they get the thrust just right for a quick, silent kill.

This is an age-old pickpocket tactic which, depending on the jurisdiction, may be called "jostling."  It means distracting the victim while a confederate removes his valuables - in this case, his life.

Every open-carry person is a walking gun store.  Do we really want to make it that easy for bad guys?

When, oh when, will the Europeans listen to their own experts?  ABC News reports:

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month's deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya - and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians. ...

Noble said there are really only two choices ... either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

There aren't enough police to guard every vulnerable facility and crowd, we are a long way from creating a secure perimeter around the entire Western world.  Even if we could do that, a lot of bad guys and potential bad guys are already here.  After all, the Boston Marathon bombers were admitted as refugees and lived off welfare until they decided to wage jihad.  If we want protection, we must protect ourselves, but open carry just makes you the first target.

How many retired police, firemen, and military do we have?  What if most of them carried concealed, where the terrorists can't see the artillery until lead flies back at them?

Actually, we don't have to ask: we know.  What happened to the two terrorists who tried to shoot up the Texas Mohammad cartoon contest?  They were ventilated as soon as they made themselves known, with no innocents so much as injured, aside from a security guard who took a bullet to the leg.  That's a good-guy bad-guy kill ratio we can applaud.

Until our ruling elites figure out that these bad guys really do want to kill as many people as possible, such successes will be all too rare.