It is not a fashion statement. Open carry is, in parts of the state a normal thing. I live on a ranch, 15 miles down a dirt road, 33 miles from my mailbox. If someone decided to do a home invasion here, it would take 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours for law enforcement to get here.
As I walk around my property, I must consider that there are very large mountain lions, javalina (collared peccary) with razor sharp teeth that will attack if you just happen to walk near them on the other side of a tree. There are two types of rattlesnakes, one of which is called a Mohave green rattlesnake, which has a neurotoxic poison and are the most deadly snake in America and they are aggressive (and I suffer from another problem, due to my loss of hearing high pitch sounds, I cannot hear them until they are right next to me.)
People here carry all the time and when they go to town they usually carry open or concealed all the time. We have to be our own police and protect each other. Our closest neighbors are two miles away.
So, can you understand why we open carry? Only some people open carry, but almost everyone here carries concealed (but trust me on this, here, almost everyone carries most all of the time!). Can you understand we are not showing off or trying to intimidate other people? Open carry is so normal to us that we don't even notice it, unless one of the visitors from around the world who come to our town on the way to the Grand Canyon, stop one of us to get a photo of them with a real cowboy with a gun.
I resent the look down your nose at us "stupid gun nuts" who open carry, when some of you people haven't the slightest fucking idea of just how important these tools are to our lives. I have voted Democrat for 50 years now and I can tell you that it is getting harder each day to justify that. I understand fully how people here vote Republican because some fucking ideologues, 1000 miles away, who don't have the slightest idea of what real life is, and they think that they should be able to force us to cower down to their unreasonable demands. I value ALL of our civil rights from the first amendment to the tenth. If you want to deny me any of my rights, then you can just go fuck off!!!
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