Don't Bring Your Guns to Town

According to Sam Paredes, Gun Owners of California's executive director, the mother in Johnny Cash's song "Don't Bring Your Guns to Town" was wrong. Do bring your guns to town. Bring them to work, out for a coffee, to walk the dog. Bring them everywhere. Dangle them out in plain sight to make sure everyone knows you have one.

Paredes was talking to KTVU about a bill San Diego Democratic Assemblywoman Lori Saldana is sponsoring to end the insane situation in which gun owners can legally brandish guns as they walk down the street. If the bill is successful, California would join the District of Columbia and only seven other states that prohibit the "open carry" of firearms.

That fact comes courtesy of opencarry.org, a "pro-gun Internet community focused on the right to openly carry properly holstered handguns in daily American life." Virginia founders John Pierce and Mike Stollenwerk say they started the community after the Washington Post ran a "series of very scathing articles and editorials attacking the practice of open carry." (The 2004 article they link to is a balanced explanation of how people openly carrying guns in Virginia were confusing police and startling community members.)

Opencarry.org says it is out there to protect the right to openly bear arms for every law-abiding American citizen who wants to have a firearm holstered to their hip while they perform mundane tasks. Yes, I wasn't kidding. We are talking about walking the dog, driving a car or having coffee at Starbucks with a gun.

Starbucks is the place to go if you want to bring your handgun to a coffee shop. The Seattle-based caffeine provider has lately been making news by not banning dangerous weapons in their stores. Like requiring shirts and shoes, a business can mandate that customers don't bring in dangerous things, like say, a gun. We've started an action here urging Starbucks to keep their cafes safe, but so far they've continued to allow open carrying.

Perhaps they're looking to add some sort of rustic Wild West atmosphere to their clean-cut decor. (After all, Pancho Villa's bullet hole in the ceiling of La Opera does add a nice touristy touch to the famous Mexico City cantina.) Personally, I'd hate to have to dodge the bullets of a jittery espresso junkie's ecstatic firing while I sip my latte. (By the way, like most of the world, Mexico has far stricter gun laws than the U.S., including a prohibition on open and concealed carrying. Sorry, Pancho, no more shooting in the restaurant.)

In addition to displaying a smoking, pistol-packing babe, opencarry.org has got loads of handy maps to detail the battle for nationwide gun liberation. I love this detail: When you click on one map legend for explanations, the website makes a little gunfire noise. What's a gun promotional website without a little bang-bang? It is good that they included a legend, though. I thought a "gold star" was something an elementary school kid received for spelling all the words right on a quiz. But nope: apparently it means a state where "open carry [is] permitted on foot and in vehicles without a license; localities preempted." (The preempted part means local governments can't amend the provisions.)

To quote open carry supporter William Kostric, who brought a gun to an Obama town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., organizations like opencarry.org — and the even scarier UPopencarry.org spin-off — are trying to "water the tree of liberty" by exerting the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" to the fullest possible extent (forget about all the Second Amendment's militia nonsense). It's a miracle this bloated phrase hasn't been used to extrapolate alternate readings, say, like the importance of ensuring that bears can shoot guns, too.

The fact we are even having a discussion about whether or not citizens can openly carry firearms is ludicrous. Jon Stewart and Wyatt Cenac couldn't contain themselves from riffing on the absurdity — especially the unspeakably horrendously parallel some are drawing between a march for free open carrying and marches for gay rights. Yes, an open carry supporter actually said that fighting for their right to carry openly was like homosexuals fighting for their civil rights. I found the link to the Stewart clip proudly posted on opencarry.org. Either they missed the joke, or I'm missing something.

To bring it all back to the man in black, let's see what happens at the end of the Cash song. Billy Joe tells his mom he's a man and rides into a cattle town with guns on his hips and a smile on his lips. He drinks strong liquor in a bar and gets provoked into a gun fight with a dusty cowpoke. He draws too late — and while his life slips away as he crumples to the ground, he repeats his mother's words: "don't take your guns to town."

Photo Credit: Takeshi Mano