How "concealed" are you in your personal life?
- Thread starter max503
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... Whatever....
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I have to agree with Muss about Tatiana Whitlock. She might be a good instructor and certainly she is our friend when it comes to firearms, but her background in firearms training looks pretty thin from what I see. She has only been interested in firearms for 3 years or so.
Biggfoot44
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Q- Is that a Gun Holster ?
A- That's a Tool Holder .
I am active in my state's gun rights group . I frequently volunteer at our booth at events both gun oriented, and general public , and lobby and testify at our Legislature , so my deep cover is blown .
My wife has been shooting since 8yo , and is an LFI graduate . I'd perfer to have her shooting back also .
A- That's a Tool Holder .
I am active in my state's gun rights group . I frequently volunteer at our booth at events both gun oriented, and general public , and lobby and testify at our Legislature , so my deep cover is blown .
My wife has been shooting since 8yo , and is an LFI graduate . I'd perfer to have her shooting back also .
I never questioned her qualifications (now I do), I’ve just never heard of her or that other instructor. . . .
Czar
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I try to be whenever possible. In the fall/spring/winter that's 99% of the time. In the summer I have not quite figured it out yet but most events I attend involve libations so the firearms stay in the safe.
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I believe there is a disconnect between the guys who actually worked the streets and some of the “firearms experts” that are supposed to train the street guys who actually confront evil folks. I learned more on the streets than from firearms experts who never worked, or who had limited experience working the street. That being said, I respect the firearms’ officers who are dedicated to preparing street guys for combat, I just believe the lessons you learn from working the street are as equally important for survival as to what the “experts” teach you.
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Broke Hoss
Member
I don't carry around the house, but may if I go to barn or pasture. But that's more for critter vermin than human kind.
Anytime I head to town I have a gun on me. There's always at least 1 in the truck, usually a long gun.
Most that know me well know I carry all the time. Some have asked, because they couldn't tell. I don't hide the fact from those close to me & don't advertise it to those that don't.
My kids thought everybody put a gun on when they left the house because they'd seen me do it their entire life. And now they do it too.
Anytime I head to town I have a gun on me. There's always at least 1 in the truck, usually a long gun.
Most that know me well know I carry all the time. Some have asked, because they couldn't tell. I don't hide the fact from those close to me & don't advertise it to those that don't.
My kids thought everybody put a gun on when they left the house because they'd seen me do it their entire life. And now they do it too.
OP
max503
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My wife isn't anti gun but she is very much the liberal Democrat . She don't complain when we are in a bad place and she knows I'm armed.
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Sol-Invictus
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I have taught my children and step children that being armed is the responsibility of every human. Since we emerged from caves the wise carried protection. This is so ingrained through natural selection and sociobiological moral development that when humans invented gods and religions a fundamental part of those myths were the responsibility and importance of arming oneself above other requirements. Look at the original Persian myths and then the later Hebrew variations or the earlier Greek, Roman, Norse, or any of the 4200 different myths in current practice today. They all fundamentally urge that their proponents be armed. Only the foolish or the ignorant ignore their genetics. Everyone who know me knows this with the caveat that just because you are armed does not mean that anyone but close family and friends need to know.
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In some states, that might mean that a wife hasn't been shooting for very long!
It's not as gun friendly as you'd think.
I'm originally from SD, and looking at census data on the number of people 21 and over and comparing that with the number of active concealed carry permits indicates that 1 in 7 adults age 21 or over has a concealed carry permit. That's 14%.
However, you'd be amazed by the outcry from the public over constitutional carry (which took affect on July 1, 2019).
Almost none of that outcry was related to lack of training, perhaps because SD has never had a training requirement for its basic permit.
Instead the concern boiled down to two areas:
1) concern that people could now conceal carry a handgun without a permit (basically ignoring the point that criminals could conceal carry a handgun anyway just by ignoring the law - and do so all the time); and
2) constitutional carry would result in more people carrying guns, and would, by their logic, make SD less safe.
Number 2 is an argument based on the assumption that guns make people bad, and on ignorance to the extent that they've been standing in line at the grocery store, at walmart, etc for literally decades with armed people right next to them and never knew it.
No matter how gun friendly you think a state is, there will always be a substantial percentage of people who are not gun friendly and who feel guns possessed by law abiding citizens make them less safe.
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That's why I don't advertise that I carry to people other than immediate family or very close friends, and that's why I have a very low tolerance for people who open carry.
The fact is that our right to carry is not God given and is instead dependent on keeping the anti-gun crowd in the minority. Our rights come with a commensurate degree of responsibility and our rights literally end when someone else's rights are infringed. In other words, we as law abiding citizens have a right to bear arms, but we risk that right when we do so in a manner that makes other law abiding Americans feel uncomfortable.
The Starbucks open carry debacle a few years ago is a great example of what happens when we ignore that reality. Customers were uncomfortable with people open carrying AR-15s in Starbucks (and Target, Chipolte, etc.) and those businesses responded because uncomfortable patrons meant lost business. Open carrying long guns was both needless and a stupid thing to do. It was a course of action that just inflamed a sensitive issue in a way that had no possible positive outcome.
Thankfully, most of those businesses I've been in since, if they posted at all, post against open carry specifically, and not open carry. Concealed means "concealed" and my carry status has NEVER alarmed any customer in any of those businesses and thus neither makes people uncomfortable or costs a business owner money.
That folks is how we'll maintain our right to bear arms.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we're always on the wrong side of statistics.
No matter how statistically rare a mass shooting is, it'll always get huge amounts of press.
Conversely when an armed citizen ends a mass shooting before it gets started (and never meets the 4 or more criteria) it gets almost no press coverage and by definition is never considered to be a mass shooting.
Worse, while we might sometimes hear about the times a concealed carried handgun was actually used to shoot an assailant, or at least have data to show the number of times this happens, there is no way to capture all the times the presence of a concealed carry handgun prevented a murder, an assault, an armed robbery, or a rape.
For example, a relative of mine, using very good SA, noted 3 guys in a convenience store who he suspected were going to jump him after he left the store. They followed him out and started closing in on him. He turned, put his hand on his gun under his jacket and asked them "What do you want to do?". Two fled immediately, the other remaining guy thought about it a few seconds and when he repeated the question he turned and ran as well. The gun never came out of the holster and a crime never actually occurred.
For one summer in college I managed a convenience store on weekends during the night shift. Every store in the chain was robbed at gun point during the night shift that summer, with the staff person usually getting badly beaten in the process - except mine. My store was also a perfect place to commit a crime as it had few windows and good escape routes out of the area. However, every time I saw someone who looked suspicious and or appeared to be just hanging out until all other customers left, I'd casually lift my shirt over the butt of my 1911 and let the suspicious person observe my armed status. I'm almost certain that 1911 in combination with good SA prevented at least one armed robbery.
Not so positively, I had an incident in Arlington VA where I had been working late and needed to get to the AT&T store to resolve a phone issue by their 9pm closing. I got $300 from an ATM, but failed to do a scan of the area. I walked quickly toward the store and then took a turn a block too early, not seeing the store I realised by mistake and turned around just in time to see a man in a hoodie directly behind be with a knife in one hand and a the other coming up toward my neck. At the speed I'd been walking and with no one else on the sidewalk he wasn't there my mistake. I bladed my body, and used my weak arm to blocked the attack and create space for the draw. As soon as my strong hand reached under my jacket for the gun on my hip, he turned and ran, because he knew he that whether he cut me or not, if he persisted he was going to get shot.
Those examples were 25 years apart in 33 years of concealed carry, so they are very low incidence examples, but for one person it's still two crimes prevented.
The more important take away in the VA incident was that if I'd been paying more attention and used better SA, the incident probably never would have happened. If I had observed him in advance and denied him the element of surprise, he'd have probably looked for a softer target. I have no idea if or how many other assailants were deterred by good SA and a concealed carry handgun in that 33 years.
I suspect there are a large number of muggings, rapes and assaults that are avoided every day because some one conceal carrying a handgun sees an assailant well in advance of an attack and telegraphs something other than fear due to their armed status.
I suspect there are an even larger number of crimes averted because an armed citizen uses good SA and good judgment to avoid places where self defense might be needed.
The number of crimes prevented can never be known and even when a gun was reached for or drawn, unless it is actually fired or the use occurs in a very public setting, very few of those uses are ever reported. Consequently, almost none of the positive effects of carrying a gun are ever quantified and thus are never credited to "good guys with guns" preventing crimes. The end result is that we'll always be subjected to statistics that "prove" how rarely a concealed carry handgun is ever used in self defense, and the resulting assumption that they are almost useless in preventing crime and thus can be banned with no significant decrease in safety.
No matter how statistically rare a mass shooting is, it'll always get huge amounts of press.
Conversely when an armed citizen ends a mass shooting before it gets started (and never meets the 4 or more criteria) it gets almost no press coverage and by definition is never considered to be a mass shooting.
Worse, while we might sometimes hear about the times a concealed carried handgun was actually used to shoot an assailant, or at least have data to show the number of times this happens, there is no way to capture all the times the presence of a concealed carry handgun prevented a murder, an assault, an armed robbery, or a rape.
For example, a relative of mine, using very good SA, noted 3 guys in a convenience store who he suspected were going to jump him after he left the store. They followed him out and started closing in on him. He turned, put his hand on his gun under his jacket and asked them "What do you want to do?". Two fled immediately, the other remaining guy thought about it a few seconds and when he repeated the question he turned and ran as well. The gun never came out of the holster and a crime never actually occurred.
For one summer in college I managed a convenience store on weekends during the night shift. Every store in the chain was robbed at gun point during the night shift that summer, with the staff person usually getting badly beaten in the process - except mine. My store was also a perfect place to commit a crime as it had few windows and good escape routes out of the area. However, every time I saw someone who looked suspicious and or appeared to be just hanging out until all other customers left, I'd casually lift my shirt over the butt of my 1911 and let the suspicious person observe my armed status. I'm almost certain that 1911 in combination with good SA prevented at least one armed robbery.
Not so positively, I had an incident in Arlington VA where I had been working late and needed to get to the AT&T store to resolve a phone issue by their 9pm closing. I got $300 from an ATM, but failed to do a scan of the area. I walked quickly toward the store and then took a turn a block too early, not seeing the store I realised by mistake and turned around just in time to see a man in a hoodie directly behind be with a knife in one hand and a the other coming up toward my neck. At the speed I'd been walking and with no one else on the sidewalk he wasn't there my mistake. I bladed my body, and used my weak arm to blocked the attack and create space for the draw. As soon as my strong hand reached under my jacket for the gun on my hip, he turned and ran, because he knew he that whether he cut me or not, if he persisted he was going to get shot.
Those examples were 25 years apart in 33 years of concealed carry, so they are very low incidence examples, but for one person it's still two crimes prevented.
The more important take away in the VA incident was that if I'd been paying more attention and used better SA, the incident probably never would have happened. If I had observed him in advance and denied him the element of surprise, he'd have probably looked for a softer target. I have no idea if or how many other assailants were deterred by good SA and a concealed carry handgun in that 33 years.
I suspect there are a large number of muggings, rapes and assaults that are avoided every day because some one conceal carrying a handgun sees an assailant well in advance of an attack and telegraphs something other than fear due to their armed status.
I suspect there are an even larger number of crimes averted because an armed citizen uses good SA and good judgment to avoid places where self defense might be needed.
The number of crimes prevented can never be known and even when a gun was reached for or drawn, unless it is actually fired or the use occurs in a very public setting, very few of those uses are ever reported. Consequently, almost none of the positive effects of carrying a gun are ever quantified and thus are never credited to "good guys with guns" preventing crimes. The end result is that we'll always be subjected to statistics that "prove" how rarely a concealed carry handgun is ever used in self defense, and the resulting assumption that they are almost useless in preventing crime and thus can be banned with no significant decrease in safety.
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OP
max503
Member
This is an OT post, but I went to school with a guy who is now an author and "expert".
Back in our high school days he used to swagger around with a big hat, and gaudy knife sheath hanging from his belt for everyone to see. He was a self-proclaimed bad-*** back then.
I don't worship experts.
Back in our high school days he used to swagger around with a big hat, and gaudy knife sheath hanging from his belt for everyone to see. He was a self-proclaimed bad-*** back then.
I don't worship experts.
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Many Americans feel that our right to carry IS God-given. I don't think it is either right or smart to challenge such people. Keeping the anti-gun crowd in the minority may help to have the law RECOGNIZE our God-given right, but it exists (or doesn't) either way.
True, IMO.
Too bad, for someone. I am a law-abiding American, and lots of things make me uncomfortable. It doesn't give me a right to outlaw them.
I don't even tell the folks on this forum if I carry or not...
We won't tell. You can trust us. You know everyone on the interest is truthful and exactly who they claim to be.
On a serious note I firmly believe in keeping it concealed and to myself. I spent the day yesterday running around with an old friend. We talked guns most of the day, but I saw no need to ever volunteer that I had one in my pocket all day.
MSgt G
US Veteran
I think we should all carry however WE feel comfortable. Otherwise, it could be considered a form of gun control.
I carry concealed and open, just depends on what I feel like doing that day. I don't care if others know, though the vast majority don't even notice while I'm carrying openly. Everyone who knows me understands that I'm always carrying and I encourage them to legally carry also.
I carry concealed and open, just depends on what I feel like doing that day. I don't care if others know, though the vast majority don't even notice while I'm carrying openly. Everyone who knows me understands that I'm always carrying and I encourage them to legally carry also.
There's no harm in recognizing that 2A rights are not God given. There is harm in believing that they are, and that as a result there are not consequences when/if law abiding gun owners act irresponsibly and are perceived as irresponsible and/or worse, a threat to other law abiding citizens.
I suspect there may have been people in other countries with strict gun laws that thought guns were a God given right, right up until they lost it.
I don't say it to be popular, I say it to make people think about it and consider their actions.
Some folks are uncomfortable with Roe v Wade, with texting and driving, with (insert issue here). When enough folks get uncomfortable laws get passed or changed. Gun laws are no different. That's just reality in a Republic.
We need to work hard to be good stewards of our 2A rights and to present ourselves as upstanding law abiding citizens with regular lives, regular jobs and regular families, who are deserving of that right - not as entitled individuals, unstable gun nuts, insensitive/irresponsible rednecks, or wanna be mall ninjas.
Just to be clear - I'm not saying you can't *be* one of those things, you just can't *act* like one of those things (in public) and expect to keep the moderates in the middle from eventually siding with the anti-gun crowd.
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BB57,
Well, I still disagree with you, but there is a lot of utility in your outlook.
Best wishes, for all of us.
Well, I still disagree with you, but there is a lot of utility in your outlook.
Best wishes, for all of us.
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