The Annoyed Man wrote:baldeagle wrote:I don't think looking to the experience of other states is quite as instructive as some do. A lot depends on the culture and attitudes of the state you live in, and they are certainly not the same. Texas is particularly unique in that regard, so I wouldn't want to go out on a limb and predict what will happen.
Yesterday morning, I was on the phone with a CS rep for National Firearms Dealers Network because I am building a website for a local FFL who has just signed up with NFDN's service. NFDN is located in Arizona. At the conclusion of the business part of our conversation, I asked her about her personal observations of open carry in Arizona. I told her that I had (briefly) OC'd in Arizona while passing through, but although I knew it was a Constitutional Carry state, I had not personally observed anybody
else OC'ing while I was there. I asked her if she saw it very often, and what her personal opinion of it was.
I figured that this woman, working for a national firearms distributorship located in Arizona, would be overtly enthusiastic about OC, but that wasn't so much the case. I would describe her attitude as "positive" toward OC, without being a cheerleader for it. When I asked her if
she had seen a lot of people OC'ing, she said that out-of-staters have to remember that Arizona has only had Constitutional Carry since 2010. We tend to think of it as having been the case forever, but that isn't so. Prior to 2010, OC was legal, but CC still required a permit. The 2010 law simply got the government out of the business of requiring a permit for CC. As to the question of how common OC is, she said that she had
rarely ever seen people OC'ing prior to 2010; but more remarkably, she said that for a
long time
after 2010, it still hadn't taken off yet. She said that is only more recently that she occasionally sees someone OC'ing in public. She said that at the NFDN offices, knows of only
one coworker who OC's.
I think this will be a pretty fair picture of the future of OC in Texas......if it passes. It will take a pretty long time—on the order of
years....perhaps a decade—after passage before we will begin to see Texans carrying openly in anything but rare numbers.
I made a mistake on this website a few years ago, when I averred that the percentage of CHL holders who actually carry is much higher than it actually is. I was set straight, and it turns out that the percentage is very small - something on the order of 6% if I recall correctly. That means that out of the 830,000 active CHL licenses, fewer than 50,000 of us actually carry.........and the number who carry
daily is a
subset of
that. A surprising number of people on this site who posted in that thread admitted that they don't carry daily.....and because of the focused topical nature of this website, our members are probably not typical, and we probably carry in higher numbers than those CHL holders who are not members here.
I suspect that the experience with OC will be similar,
especially if it is
licensed OC. A lot of our members have stated (including me) that even if OC passes, we would probably only rarely OC ourselves. So that is a small percentage (CHLs who open carry) of a small percentage (CHLs who are members of this forum) of a small percentage (the barely 3% of people who actually
have a CHL).
If OC is unlicensed, the numbers will be mostly the same, with the addition of a few OC activists who refused for philosophical reasons to obtain a CHL.....but in shear numbers, that is NOT a lot of people. Even if ALL CHLs who carry daily declared they would regularly OC, and we doubled that number to account for the addition of an equal number of OCers without licenses, we're probably still at less than 100,000 people. So either way, OC is just not going to be that common, whether it is licensed or not.
as similarly stated above. Therefore, using your assumptive numbers, this is less than 0.4% of the population of Texas. And I think that's probably a high number.