Point Austin: In Defense of the Public Square

In the wake of the Jan. 1 enforcement of the Texas Legislature's open carry handgun law, it's been gratifying to see the lengthening list of Austin and Texas businesses announcing that they'll ban weapons in their venues – not just 30.07 bans (no open carry) but 30.06 as well (no concealed weapons). Our News email has been peppered with so many business owners letting us know ("Add us to your list"), that we've been having trouble keeping up, and the state list (at the website for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America) is of course much longer. Folks have thanked us for providing the DIY signage in last week's issue – a special thanks is also due to Moms Demand Action and local activist Ed Scruggs for diligently asking businesses to discourage guns and gun-brandishing. It's nice to know, for example, that H-E-B and Fresh Plus are united at least in this policy: Leave your guns at home.

It's also useful to know that major businesses like Target (for a different example) are waffling, declining to take a public stand, telling the media they "respectfully request" their customers not carry guns, but refusing to post the signs that would actually prohibit people from doing so. Even worse, Wal-Mart has imposed on its employees the responsibility to ask gun-brandishers if they happen to have a license. How many of those conversations will turn into dangerous confrontations, necessitating police intervention, or worse? "An armed society is a polite society," goes the gun-fetishists' mantra – yet witness the explicitly threatening behavior of the Constitutional Carry crowd last year at the Capitol ("Gun Bullies Lead ... Lawmakers Follow," Jan. 23, 2015).

Most gun owners are responsible, support rational restrictions (like universal background checks), and don't in fact see any sense in walking around openly armed, unless your intention is to intimidate people or provoke a dispute. "Open carry" expressly hands public power to the most reckless and irresponsible gun owners, who want to walk about openly armed like displaced movie villains, and let everyone else guess their intentions.

The Backlash Begins

Yet another encouraging consequence of the new Texas era is that most gun owners are beginning to see the folly of these increasingly thoughtless laws and behaviors. The Trace (a news website specializing in gun coverage) noted this week that CHL holders are becoming alarmed that numerous businesses are not distinguishing between concealed and open carry, and are banning both. "I have had my CHL 20 years this year and I hardly ran into any legal signs back then," one posted. "This [new law] has woken up the anti-crowd in a big way. So now the genie is out of the bottle and I don't see a way to put it back."

Others even speculate that open carry is a plot instigated by anti-gun forces to create a public backlash. (It's too much to wish that they'll vote out the legislative panderers who sponsored the law.) Perhaps that means Constitutional Carry – the mythical no-gun-regulations fantasized by pro-gun absolutists – will have a more difficult time in next year's Lege. Forcing employees, police officers, college students, and ordinary citizens to guess whether an approaching gunman is a "good guy" or a "bad guy" would steadily abolish all semblance of public order and civil community. And that's exactly what the worst of these gun fetishists, and their industry/NRA sponsors, are advocating.

Defending Community

It would be a sweet irony if open carry could provide the tipping point for the broader community to finally insist, enough is enough. The quite moderate measures announced by President Obama earlier this month – all that's available under current federal law and Congress­ion­al gridlock – induced the predictable hysteria from the usual suspects, including Gov. Greg Abbott (even in advance of the announcement; see "Public Notice: Out of Their Cold Dead Brains," Jan. 8). In fact, the measures (most importantly, more comprehensive background checks for gun sales) are supported by a large majority of the public, including a majority of gun owners. The NRA scam and demagoguery can't continue forever.

These small steps are important, but even more important is a steady change in the cultural and political tolerance for reflexive gun culture and the gun violence it sustains. No other advanced nation accepts or indulges this reflexively violent atmosphere. Like the college students who marched on the Capitol last weekend, we need to keep rejecting publicly the preposterous notion that ubiquitous guns make us safer. And we need to oppose and condemn those politicians – including all the current crop of Republican presidential candidates – who endorse and promote this extremist agenda. Whatever laws we enact, the country remains awash in guns and riddled with gun violence. We must work to make reliance on guns, especially among young people, a last resort, and increasingly unthinkable. We cannot let the gun fetishists rule our public spaces or dominate our communities.