Rattled and shaken after seeing open carry in a grocery store

[MsJaneFuzzyWuzzy]

285. This is the very WHY of carrying guns in public.

Carrying them concealed doesn't have quite the same effect, so the political push for some time now has been for "open carry".

Carrying guns concealed does achieve some of the same effect, to the extent that the public is aware that it is allowed and that one can never be sure who might have a gun on their person.

But displaying them is the quickest and most sure-fire way to achieve the objective.

Which is?

To put you and everyone else on notice that you have no say in what goes on in the public spaces of your society, and you do not matter.

Any individual gun-carrier may think they are "exercising their rights" (when was that ever a reason to do something??), or being prepared in case somebody tries to take their stuff, or being a good sheepdog who is ready to single-handedly stop the next gun massacre.

But the ideology that is behind it, the ideology of the organizations that have instilled all those notions in each of those individuals, is the ideology of the right wing, and it is the right wing's insatiable thirst for control that drives the movement.

A gun displayed in a public place has the effect of impressing on you that you do not matter, your children do not matter, your safety and security and rights do not matter. (Just as does the bit of the ideology that says that dead children are the price of the gun lovers' freedom. If we mattered, we would not be defined as payment for anything, let alone something we have not chosen to sacrifice ourselves for and in fact oppose.)

When Robert Heinlein said that an armed society was a polite society, what he was really saying was that an armed society is a terrorized society.

That you felt terrorized is not a personal quirk, it is the intended effect of what you observed, whether that particular Mr. Open Carry would assert that as his intention or not.