Perceptions on being armed, and the use of force.

(Note, this was originally a post that I went to post in 2015, but for some reason held back.  As I have quite a few old posts in the stable that I haven't published I'm either publishing them or deleting them.  Hence the out of date references).

"Welcome to Wyoming. . . consider everyone armed".

That's a common bumper sticker in this region.  And its not far from the truth, although it isn't really true either.

Recently I happened to have the pleasure of dining with a retired FBI agent.  He's a firearms owner and proponent of gun owners rights, but he's also from a big East Coast city and was fairly horrified by the recent change in concealed carry laws across the nation.

For those who do not follow this, and I suppose most people do not, over the past 20 years there's been a real evolution in this area.  At one time, many, perhaps most states, had really local provisions on this.  It wasn't atypical to have it be in the control of a local police force.  In Wyoming, for example, concealed carry permits, up until about 20 years ago, were issued by the local sheriff.  Some sheriffs would issue anyone one a permit, some almost nobody.

There's also been a bit open carry movement in some places, which is very much an oddity from a Wyoming prospective.  Absent some frontier towns that would ban open carrying of firearms during times of civil unrest, anyone has always been able to openly carry a firearm here.  You don't see people routinely doing it, but it's perfectly legal and always has been.  There were no restrictions at all, other than building restrictions the owners of buildings put in place.

All of this has somewhat changed in recent years.  We, like most states, went to a concealed permit system that normalized issuance through the state, and our state has reciprocity with numerous others.  This sort of permitting system has spread across the US.  Also, our state, like some others, has licensed concealed carry without a permit under some circumstances.  Our system allows anyone qualified for a permit to carry concealed, although people commonly erroneously believe that the state now allows everyone to carry concealed. That's incorrect, you still have to qualify under the law to carry concealed.

I don't know what got this movement rolling, but a friend of mine who occupies a position with a governmental body, but which isn't a law enforcement position, carries a concealed arm, to my surprise.  Indeed, I was in a meeting and found that both that fellow and another one we were meeting with were both armed, which I would not have guessed.  Asking my fried about it, he explained it in a manner different than I would have supposed it to be explained. The gist of it was, that by carrying concealed, the concealed carrier was ready should there be a need, but he also was not giving alarm and stressing people. And, by allowing it widely, there was no way for criminals to know who was armed and who was not, and that this was sort of a deterrent therefore.

Indeed, only shortly before that, a man tried to rob a hair dresser shop at our mall. He was armed, but it turned out that one of the ladies in the shop was carrying a pistol, and he accordingly fled upon her withdrawing it.  I guess that's the gist of it.

My FBI friend feels, as the NRA does, that there should be nationwide reciprocity, but he pretty clearly feels that open carry and concealed carry should both require training.  Our concealed carry requires some sort of training or proof of military service, but open carry does not.  This reflects the views of the locality.  Open carry has always been legal here except, perhaps ironically, during the late Frontier period when some cities would ban it temporarily if something was going on. 

Which is a long introduction to this point.  I've recently learned and become amazed to find how many people do in fact carry concealed handguns here. It's a lot. And I'm comfortable with that.

I'm comfortable with that as firearms are part of the culture here, and there aren't very many improper uses of them.  It just doesn't happen much.

People are acclimated to them, however, and they're pretty ready to use them if they need to.

When the terrible terrorist attack happened in Boston last year, the trial of which is now going on here, I was amazed by how the entire town shut down.  People talked a lot about how brave Boston was, but from here, I'm sorry to say, it didn't look that way.  I know that sounds awful, but there's no way that the reaction would have been the same in a Western town or city.  The hunt wouldn't have gone on all day, and the terrorist would have been really lucky if the police found him before an armed citizen did.  For that matter, I doubt the police would have been able to really keep people from getting involved.  I'm sure they would have tried, but my suspicion is that the second people knew what was going on, there'd be a lot of firearms loaded.  It'd be hard to get a person here to wait for the police to come to your boat to trap him, at least in some instances.

The same occurred to me during the recent tragedy of the terrorist strikes in Europe. They're  horrible, but I can't help but feel that they wouldn't have lasted quite so long here.  Indeed, I suppose, we have a local, although old, example in the form of the Johnson County War, when an illegal army invaded Johnson and Natrona counties, and was put under siege by the mad armed citizenry of Johnson County. It wasn't the Army, or law enforcement that stopped the invasion, although Sheriff "Red" Angus did mobilize the residents of Johnson County.  It was the citizenry of the county.

An approach somewhat like this actually makes up the defense posture of some nations, albeit in a much modified form. The Swiss, famously, have had for years what amounts to a giant militia.  Target shooting is the national sport of Switzerland, and the Swiss have simply issued individual weapons, with ammunition, to each male of military age.  They are not to break into the ammo, of course, but it's interest to find an entire European nation that has simply issued selective fire weapons to half its citizens, for decades.  Switzerland had not fought a war since the Napoleonic era, and some speculate that this is party of the reason why.

The British, amazingly given their strict gun control policies, nearly did the same in the early 1960s prior to the elimination of National Service.  The plan was to issue individual weapons to the Territorials, their reservists, based on the Swiss model. The plan fell through when National Service was abruptly ended, and the UK fell back on its tradition of a small but highly trained professional army.

Various nations in Africa, however (including the Middle Eastern example of Israel) have relied upon this model at different times, although I'm not really informed on the details, so that's about all I can say about it.  Interestingly, the Republic of Vietnam was set to return to the model, which had partially been used by the French for trusted hamlets when they governed Indochina.  South Vietnam felt that the Communist insurgency in its country had fallen to the state that it planned on issuing military weapons at the village level so that villages could take care of their own problems, prior to the North Vietnamese invasion of 1975.  That the latter stage of the Vietnam War was a conventional war is sometimes a bit ignored in the story of that conflict.

This taps into the controversial views expressed quite a few years ago in an essay called "A Nation Of Cowards".  Frankly, I didn't pay very much attention to that essay at the time, as it just didn't seem very relevant to my life here, but there's something to it, strong words though they be.  A person can clearly overdo this, and I'm not really saying that everyone should go around armed all the time, but the psychological differences between groups of people whose first resort is to seek help form the authorities if something develops, as opposed to do that and prepare to take it on themselves, is real.  

Of course, distance and isolation, as well as history, have a lot to do with that.  Critics of this area, as well as fans of it, will cite to our "Frontier mentality", which may be a bit inaccurate in these regards, but there is a different sort of history in regions where people are of the view that they have to take care of a lot of things themselves.   

Is this good or bad?  I guess that depends on your point of view.  But for those of us here, the concept of having to depend on the police to handle the problem, and not being able to yourself if you needed to, seems odd.  But then, for many elsewhere, the opposite probably does.