Blogs For Victory

Tip of the hat to some of my home town gun nuts:

Nevada is an “open carry” state. That is to say, while state and local governments impose certain unconstitutional restrictions on the God-given (and constitutionally guaranteed) right to carry a weapon concealed, there is no state law barring Nevadans from going about with a sidearm openly holstered on the hip.

While this right to openly carry is exercised with some regularity in Northern Nevada, Metro and other Las Vegas Valley police officers seem to be under the mistaken impression that it’s some kind of a “crime” for an adult of sound mind to go about openly armed. In fact, there have actually been cases where Metro officers have killed otherwise law-abiding citizens for this imagined “offense” — universally getting away with it when there is no contradicting testimony (the other party being conveniently dead) to the officer’s well-rehearsed tale (usually told to a carefully selected coroner’s jury), that the decedent “made a furtive movement toward his waistband,” or even simply “failed to stop and disarm when so ordered.”

Thus, it takes some courage — some would say foolhardiness — to openly exercise this constitutional right.

Now comes one Billy Logan, who signs himself “NRA Member, GONV Member, Staunch Libertarian, Proud Gun Owner and 2nd Amendment Advocate” and who has e-mailed me that “A bunch of law abiding gun owners” plan to convene at the Buffalo Wild Wings located at 190 West Craig Rd in North Las Vegas, at 11a.m., Sunday May 17th, then around 12:30 p.m. we’re going to head over to East Lake Mead Blvd and North Bruce St., right next to the NLVPD,” to pick up trash in the vacant lot there.

“Nobody is formally ‘in charge’ of the event,” my correspondent insists, “It’s just a bunch of law abiding gun owners meeting to help the public and the police become aware and possibly educated on firearms and open carrying…

It shouldn’t be a big nothing – just armed American citizens going about their business. Only in the modern world where the State has decided that guns are too tricky for the citizenry has this become an issue. But now that the US Supreme Court has ruled that the right to bear arms is, indeed, an individual right, it is time to start testing the limits and getting government – and especially law enforcement – used to honest citizens being armed in the normal course of the day.

The key to good law enforcement is not some officer driving around at night and trying to figure out if the shadowy figure down the alley is a criminal he should be stopping or just an honest citizen about his business – there should never be a need for a cop to say that he shot someone because he moved towards his waistband, furtively or otherwise. The police are not supposed to be the heroes riding to the rescue, nor are they really supposed to be an investigative agency – they are there to keep the peace, which means patrolling in such a manner that people ill disposed have as few chances as possible to carry out their nefarious plans. True, there will always be that aspect of police work – hero and investigator…but mostly the job of the police is negative: to make it so things don’t happen, thus obviating the need for heroics or investigations.

It is impossible for a cop on a motorcycle or in a car to get a genuine feel for the neighborhood he’s patrolling – only if he’s out on the street and walking around will he learn who is supposed to be there and what the likelihood is that the figure dashing through the yard is a burglar or just someone trying to find the cat. Part of the way the police can do this is by using the manpower available to them – the armed citizens who can be induced to volunteer to watch, listen and learn about their neighborhoods, and keep the police informed of anything out of the ordinary. And not by calling the cops and getting an anonymous dispatcher, but by flagging down the beat cop who also knows the area and pointing out the reason for suspicion. Meanwhile, the fact that honest citizens are openly armed will in and of itself discourage criminals. It won’t stop crime, but the more careful we have to make criminals the less crimes they’ll be able to commit.

Armed police, armed citizens – together we can return America to that time when a murder was a shocking thing, even in big cities. Let’s hope that Sunday’s experiment goes off without a hitch, and that the police draw the proper conclusions.