Open Carry

I've been open carrying for a few years now.  99.99% of the time no one says anything about the gun.  Funny thing though, it's as if all of a sudden this past week people started taking notice and engaging me in conversation.

I'm an introvert and honestly, I'd rather not have impromptu conversations with random strangers.  That said, to some extent that's just a chance you take if you're going to carry where people can see your gun.  This past weekend in the course of an hour or so I had 4 or 5 people strike up a conversation with me / comment on my carrying.  That's as many comments as I've gotten over the past several years of carrying.

I was at the Acme and an elderly man came up to me, shook my hand and thanked me for carrying.  Then, I'm in the produce section and I hear "Mike!  Hey Mike" but don't see anyone.  Then up comes a kid I went to grade school with, whom I haven't seen since college.  He asks what I'm carrying (The Walther PPQ) thought it was "badass to carry it out in the open like that." then he chatted about the Kahr he just bought.  He made sure to mention that he "totally supports the 2nd Amendment, but not the NRA's agenda" whatever that means.

As I'm leaving the store an employee says to me "excuse me sir, let me just say I have the utmost respect for people who exercise their rights and carry like that."

I did have a rather odd conversation with the guy at the tire shop putting on my summer wheels.  I remember checking the sex offender website a few years back for my area.  You can find sex offenders in the area, with their addresses, names, picture, where they work, what the crime was and the address of their employers.  This guy was definitely on the sex offender registry, and here he is chatting with me about my gun.  I was more than a little creeped out by this, and was not nearly as polite as usual, because I just don't have any respect for sex offenders.

If you are a sex offender and you're asking me if I have a round chambered you are probably not going to like my response.

With the exception of one comment, and the creepy sex-offender guy, every single comment I've gotten from a stranger regarding open carry has been overwhelmingly positive.  Even sex offender guy was not anti-gun.  Obviously this is a Blue State, but I must do a good job of staying away from the kind of raving, anti-gun leftists that infect places like Delaware Liberal.