Open Carry Protects the First and Second Amendment

​John MacArthur is the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California—a district of Los Angeles. On Sept. 10th, a judge granted the county an injunction against the church because MacArthur has dared to hold indoor services, which are against California’s coronavirus edicts. MacArthur cited many reasons, from weather considerations (the inland valleys of Los Angeles get desert hot) to biblical ones, for disobeying the edicts.
 
The simplest one is the freedom of religion. To this audience, I don’t need to make the arguments of why MacArthur and all churches should be allowed to meet indoors. We’re here to talk about guns and rights.
 
California has prohibited open carry and practically any other form of unlicensed carry. Licensed carry is darn near impossible in Los Angeles County and many other counties as well. Presuming that the church elders and pastors prayed about it and were on board with it, it is impossible for patriots to legally defend the church with openly carried rifles.
 
Now standing around a church or business with openly carried rifles is a threat. “If you try to close down this place, we will prevent you from doing that, possibly with deadly force.” Of course, at this hour many patriots are unwilling to go that far and arguably it might not be wise to dial things up to 11…yet. But it is nonetheless a powerful statement to have men with guns facedown police or worse, some flunky from the health/business licensing department.
 
The whole idea of standing around with guns is that someone in the sheriff’s department will have the sense to avoid the PR disaster. One (fat) sheriff in Ector County, Texas, didn’t have the sense to do that when he sent Donut Team Six to raid a bar with open carriers protesting in the back. On the far end of the dial, the patriot security team stops the bureaucrat from entering (physically), probably beats them to get the point across, and uses their firearms to deter/stop the predictable police response. It kinda gets ugly from there, so we don’t need to go further, but again we’re looking at the extreme.
 
You see, in California, citizens don’t even get the opportunity to make the PR point by blocking the entrance of the bureaucrat until they give up and just mail the citation. Open carry is a powerful political tool of protest. Lots of peaceful people with guns makes a point that politicians can’t ignore. That’s why they banned it in California, starting in 1967, and other states are looking to do the same thing.
 
12,000 armed Americans in Richmond, Virginia, scares Democrats. Nevada’s own Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui slandered open carry protesters as domestic terrorists through crafty wordplay. Ideally, the hoplopaths would love to make it illegal for you to take your gun outside your home. This way, you are forced to disobey the law to exercise your First and Second Amendment rights.
 
If it is illegal to protest, even peacefully, with your rifle openly carried, that means if you choose to do it (or protect a business or church from tyranny) you will have to decide if you are willing to be arrested or fight the cops. Even if you don’t fight the cops, detectives can simply identify you later and the DA can charge you after the fact. Then you’re playing roulette with a state judicial system that is not in your favor. Unless you want to kill cops, that is, and going that route is something very few of us on the right want to do.
 
Banning open carry is nothing more than a blatant suppression of free speech and the castration of the Second Amendment.