A discussion about folks who want to carry guns out in the open, in Utah and elsewhere.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

My 20-month-old nephew loves Elmo and Dora. He also has started making explosion and gunfire noises. 

I get the inevitability of little boys' fascination for guns. 

What I can't figure out are the men and sometimes women who don't grow out of the gun-crazy stage of childhood, who need to have a handgun on their hips at all times, who need their neighbors to notice. 

Ten of them stormed the West Valley City Council meeting last week to back up Travis Deveraux, a 36-year-old credit card company worker who was detained by police last December while exercising with his Smith & Wesson. 

"I don't blame them for being a little bit extra careful," Deveraux said. 

"But there's a line they crossed between being a little bit careful and a little bit too careful." 

I thought there was no such thing as "too careful" - especially with a gun. But the OpenCarry crowd's literal interpretation of the "right to bear arms" and self-appointment as our "well-regulated militia" undercuts careful law enforcement, membership in a civil society and even reason. 

It's in the Constitution, their thinking goes. They are "peaceably going about their business while armed," standing on the watchtower, the last line of defense against government tyranny and crazed criminals. We should thank them. 

I understand the thrill of firing a Glock (I've done it), the euphoria of hitting the center of a target (and that too), generations of family deer-hunting weekends and the legitimate self-preservation instincts of Utah's elected concealed weapon carriers. 

But the OpenCarry movement is a mystery to me. What kind of psychology - overcompensation, paranoia, antisocial personality - is behind that thinking? 

...

"Second Amendment questions aside," says Springwood, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, "the real debate seems to me a cultural and social one: Do we want a society in which it is an unconscious emblem of everyday life that folks move about with 'portable killing machines' strapped to their bodies?" 

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