chuck j wrote:CJD wrote:chuck j wrote:CJD wrote:Dave2 wrote:MeMelYup wrote:I cannot understand why Grisham continues to try and incite discention between groupes.
The only believable explanation is that they're shills for some anti-gun group.
Not if you think about the group he represents. A large portion of the OCT population are those without CHLs. He is, therefore, only going to support bills that benefit his populace. In the same way that many on this forum oppose legislation expanding gun rights for only a subgroup of CHLs (removal of off limits areas for only legislators for example), they oppose legislation like licensed open carry because it doesn't benefit the majority of their members.
Not trying to argue at all but why don't they just get a CHL if that's the case ? Classroom time is nothing and the expense is very minimal , they have spent more money and time driving around tormenting the police and government officials .
For some of them, the expense is more than minimal. For most, it's out of principle: one should not have to pay for a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Otherwise, it's a privilege not a right. Would you pay $200 for a free speech license? $200 for a no troops quartered in my home license? For a no search without a warrant license? Only those with a no search without a warrant license require a warrant to be searched, all others you may search at will.
Do you think their plan is working ?
There is also the fact that a bunch of them CAN'T get a CHL because they are unstable people with a loose sense of morality, and their personal
legal histories proves it. Kory Watkins is the poster-child for some of these folks. He can spout high and mighty about not having a CHL because "he doesn't believe he should have to pay for permission", and that is a true statement, but the FACT is that he CAN'T get a CHL because he is a bad actor. CJ Grisham has had his CHL revoked for behaving criminally.......as proven in a court of law.
So their recourse is to get rid of CHL so that they can carry, and their strongest supporters are those who are in the same boat - those people who have no self control or ability to cooperate with and get along with others.
Now, these folks are NOT prototypical of the majority of OC supporters.
I support unlicensed open carry, and I am probably more representative of the person who does. But there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. The right way will get you there, and the wrong way will blow up in your face and actually set you back. The problem the community of OC supporters face is that it has been coopted by a pretty radical fringe, made up of a lot of people who think that Kory Watkins, CJ Grisham, and anybody like them are heroic figures, instead of the dangerous out of control wingnuts they are.......because they themselves are exactly like Kory Watkins and CJ Grisham. And THOSE folks are doing things the wrong way.
Are THOSE the kind of people we want representing us? Not me, thank you. A) They damage the movement; B) they categorically refuse to accept any responsibility for the damage they've done; and C) they respond by doing MORE damage.
They HAVE to go, because the entire movement is being branded with
their lunacy......and it is TRULY discouraging that there are people out there who just can't see it. It is THAT kind of willful blindness to boots on the ground realities which dooms us.
Would "instant enactment of unlicensed OC by act of God" be desirable? Yes, it would. But that is not how it works. If there was such an overwhelming sentiment in favor of unlicensed open carry among the general populace,
including particularly among the conservatives who dominate our legislature,
WE WOULD HAVE UNLICENSED CARRY ALREADY!!!! But the fact is, there ISN'T such overwhelming support - not even among legislative conservatives - and politics is a numbers game. If you don't have the numbers, your agenda will not pass, plain and simple. If we HAD the numbers, it would already have passed. We DON'T have the numbers, but we are close.
How close? Close enough that if guys like Kory Watkins would just take a powder and SHUT UP (!!!!) for a while, we still have a chance of getting licensed OC now, and then getting unlicensed OC in the future. As Charles has pointed out, we DID have (but no longer have) a 50/50 chance of getting unlicensed OC passed in 2017........IF.......we can get
licensed OC passed today.
But the negative impact of the OC radicals is three-fold: 1) it guarantees that unlicensed OC will not pass this year; 2) it threatens passage of licensed OC
this year; and it removes unlicensed OC from consideration in 2017. The spoiled little brats of OCTC and OCT who cannot act like adults lack the maturity or intellectual horsepower to comprehend the mess they have made of things; and so their reaction, instead of accepting that there is a time to be quiet and let the knowledgable do their work, is to double down and increase the volume.
There is a fairly significant Gypsy community in the Pasadena/Glendale area of Southern California, and they used our ER as their family medical clinic. One time, the King of the Gypsies, who lived in Pasadena, had a major heart attack and he was rushed to our ER. He required immediate open-heart surgery, and we rushed him up to the OR to begin prepping him for surgery. Some of the Gypsy men followed us (unscrubbed) into the OR and refused to leave. When asked why, they said they wanted to make sure that the heart surgeon (one of the very best in SoCal at the time) did things right.......like they would actually
know.... Well, police had to eject them from the OR, and we had to rush the patient into
another OR while the first had to be taken offline and decontaminated. Praise God for laminar flow ORs, or it would have take a lot longer. And in the meantime, they also tried to steal anything that wasn't nailed down in our ER. They were finally all ejected from the hospital, except for the man's wife and children. But the whole time, the others kept trying to sneak in through any door they could find, and generally disrupting nearly the entire hospital's routine.
These fringe lunatics of the gun-rights movement are the Gypsies of the gun world. I have been currently involved in exchanges with people from OCT/OCTC on Facebook over this very issue. They CAN'T respond with logic, so they post blizzards of memes, and accuse me of being anti-gun because they say that I'm "in it for the moneyed interests". Wait....... what the WHAT? What does that even mean?
Until the open carry movement tells the Kory Watkins' an CJ Grishams of the world to take a hike and step out of the way of the adults, their actions will continue to kill off unlicensed open carry; and for that, I am beyond angry at them, because THEY are the traitors to the cause — not those of us who understand that politics is the art of the
possible, which necessarily includes what "possible" is defined as by people who oppose gun-rghts. This is the REAL world, and neither Watkins nor Grisham have been in touch with reality for some time now.