GunTruth has a pretty detailed piece up over at his blog about an open carry dinner in Pennsylvania that got raided by the Dickson City police. This kind of thing happened in Virginia too when VCDL started doing this. I don’t open carry much at all, but it is a legal practice in Pennsylvania, without a license in the rest of the state, and with a license in the City of Philadelphia. I have met the guy who was arrested in this, and while he is someone who will stand up for his rights and the law, he’s definitely not brash, abrasive, or rude.
It’s a fact of open carrying that sometimes people will freak out and call the cops, especially in the parts of Pennsylvania that are absorbing a lot of residents from New Jersey and New York, where the practice is illegal. I think 911 call centers and police departments need to be trained on the fact that the practice is legal, and how to deal with that kind of situation. VCDL has done a pretty good job of getting that done in Virginia, and I think we will in Pennsylvania too.
UPDATE: I should inform everyone that you’ll see a lot of talk of registration in this thread. Pennsylvania currently has a defacto registry, as the PA State Police has been computerizing records of sale and putting them into a big database. The legislature made creating a registry illegal in 1996, but the State Supreme Court ruled that because the database was not comprehensive, it was not a registry. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen cases where the registry is being treated as a registry of all firearms. We need to make getting rid of this “registry” our number one priority in Pennsylvania once we’re rid of Fast Eddie.
It was the “Dickson City” police, not “Dickinson City”.