fully cocked, but half loaded?

several of my friends figured i’d be stoked about the texas legislature passing the open carry bill…

…and they’d be wrong.

first off, i have no problem with people who properly tested getting a permit to carry a concealed handgun. i did it, you can too. and to have issue with it while HAVING a permit is stupid and hypocritical. but that involves CONCEALMENT. i liked the fact that a lot of the class (at least the one i took) focused on general gun ownership, home protection, and to a degree crisis management and threat assessment (and yes, if the good folks at central texas gun works want to quote me on that they’re more than welcome to do so). the problem i have with concealed licenses is our deal of reciprocity (i.e. letting other states who have permits have their permits count in texas so they’ll let ours count in their state). some states allow you to apply and get permits even though you don’t live there (to make the money, i’ll assume) and take classes online versus actually ever HOLDING a gun. but i already covered that…

being able to wear a gun on your hip is stupid. yes, it shows all the “bad guys” that you’re a “bad ass” or whatever the fucking motivation is…but honestly, it really just scares the piss out of normal folk. i’m not a small guy…and i tend to look intimidating to most with the tattoos and piercings and shaved head and such. do i look more so with my h&k tucked in my waist? no. because there’s NO FUCKING POINT! put but that motherfucker in a shoulder holster or on my hip and i look even more like a cop or military guy (which i get a lot…again, mainly due to my physique, lack of hair, and tendency to wear camo). in short, open carry is openly pointless…but what a lot of people don’t realize is, according to most texas gun law sites i read (and there are a LOT) the recent bills only add handguns to the LIST. if you have a chl (concealed handgun license) you can now carry your gun on your hip, and was touted online by posts like this:

but what a lot of people don’t realize is the guys on the right are NOW legal, where as the guys on the left always were. yep, believe it or not, carrying a NON-handgun openly in texas, if you can legally own one and they don’t have signs to the contrary, has been legal for ages. so our trip to the target in kyle, texas, last night to get oz “sick bricks” (which were the banner ad on the bottom of the gun site i got most of my info from, by the way) could have looked like this down aisle seven:

but it didn’t. so maybe this won’t be quite the thing it’s being made out to be…at least i hope not, thanks to that little bit they slipped into the bill just before it passed and after all these police organizations supported it, even though now they don’t thanks to the addition:

cops can’t ask…

…yeppers, that’s right – if the cops see a guy with a .45 on his hip they can’t ask him if he has a permit unless they have “reasonable suspicion” that he’s doing something wrong OTHER than carrying an illegal gun.

and that’s fucked up.

so now, if you’re a criminal, and you want to get away with being armed, just keep it on your hip…if they see it poking out from under your shirt (which is called “printing” if you take the concealed class) then you get asked if you have a permit for that thing…but in a nice, black, ballistic nylon holster with “cop killer” embroidered on it? they can’t ask you SHIT. ‘MERICA!

my thought is that a lot of gun nuts are just too fat to wear it in their waist or pocket, so they had to get holsters legalized…but i think we all know who’s to blame: