Before you dash off to the store, you go through that little checklist. (Your list is probably similar to mine.) Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Cell phone, shopping list, gun. Check, check, \u2026wait. You don\u2019t go shopping with your gun? Why not? If you live in Missouri you have the right to. It\u2019s one of the joys of living in an \u201copen carry\u201d state. Open carry means that as long as you legally own a gun you can proudly wear it in plain view of everyone. Now the idea of wearing your gun to go grocery shopping may sound odd, but on March 12, a man did just that in my neighborhood. And it caused a small uproar.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a moment to talk about that little incident. On March 12, Brett Darrow was in the checkout lane of the Maplewood Wal-Mart. He was wearing a gun, it was clearly visible. Other patrons had seen the gun and alerted some store employees, who in turn called 911. He wasn\u2019t behaving weird, he wasn\u2019t causing any trouble. Brett was just wearing a pistol and that made people uncomfortable enough to want to call the cops. (Once the cops showed up, he refused to identify himself and they arrested him for an outstanding traffic warrant, but that really isn\u2019t important.<\/a>) The important thing is that it\u2019s perfectly legal to be out in public wearing a gun.<\/p>\n

That might be changing in my neighborhood. The city council of Maplewood decided that maybe being open carry wasn\u2019t such a great idea. (Remember, just the sight of one gun at Wal-Mart was enough to make people nervous. Imagine what would happen if we all started packing heat.) They proposed an ordinance that would ban open carry in our city of about 9,000. It gets voted on Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The ban is expected to be a shoe-in. But that only matters here in my backyard. The whole state of Missouri is legally open carry. It\u2019s up to the local government of each city whether or not they want their citizens carrying guns in plain sight.<\/p>\n

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