Earlier
this month, in the parking lot of the Shop Rite supermarket in West
Haven, Connecticut, a young man pulled a semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle
out of his Toyota SUV. Shoppers watched from a cautious distance as he
placed the loaded rifle on the floor behind the driver’s seat and then
walked away, carrying his laptop case and two handguns. A witness
described the armed man to 9-1-1 operators—he was Asian, wearing dark
sunglasses and heading toward the University of New Haven campus. UNH
students were ordered to shelter in place as police searched for the
suspect. Officers spotted William Dong when he emerged from biology
class in Kaplan Hall, still carrying the two Glock pistols. A subsequent
search of Dong’s padlocked bedroom (in his parents’ home) turned up
2700 rounds of ammunition, as well as newspaper clippings about the
Aurora theater massacre.
,
defense attorney Frederick Paoletti said Dong will plead not guilty to
weapons charges. Though the Bushmaster is on a list of guns that are
restricted under a
,
Dong might have purchased his rifle before the ban went into effect.
And the pistols? He had a permit for them, and Connecticut law makes no
distinction between “concealed carry” (wearing a gun under your
clothing) and “open carry” (walking around with a gun that everybody can
see).
The debate over open carry is the new front line in the battle over gun rights and public safety in American culture. In Texas,
and elsewhere, gun rights activists have been staging protests,
demanding broader liberty to display their guns in public rather than
keep them concealed under clothing. Major
in statewide elections have voiced support for open carry, asserting
that the conspicuous display of firepower will deter crime. For decades,
though, social scientists have studied the way people behave around
guns, and they’ve found that
—not just criminals—will be affected by seeing guns in our everyday environment.
CJ
Grisham, president of Open Carry Texas, says there’s no reason to fear
civilians with guns. “This idea that gun owners are angry and just
looking for an opportunity to shoot somebody is absolutely false,” he
explains. “Although if I’m threatened by somebody, I’m not going to
hesitate—if somebody points a gun at me I’m gonna get there first.”
Indeed, there have been
many incidents
of armed civilians using their guns for legitimate self-defense. But
civilian gun owners reacting to imaginary dangers have also
killed unarmed people. A recent
study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that, when people are holding a gun, they’re
less capable of evaluating a threat
than they would be if they didn’t have a weapon in their own hands.
Jessica Witt, a psychologist at Colorado State University, asked
volunteers to hold either a plastic gun or a neutral object (such as a
ball) as they reacted to pictures flashed on a screen. The photos
depicted people holding various objects—sometimes a gun; sometimes a
shoe, a soda can, or a cell phone. While holding a gun, volunteers were
more likely to misidentify the object in the photo as a gun. (Likewise,
if you’re holding a shoe, you’re more likely to think the guy in the
photo is holding a shoe—but that mistake isn’t likely to end in
tragedy.)
“You can imagine the kind of actions people are going to
take if they misperceive an object as being a gun,” Witt says. “That’s
going to be a terrible consequence— obviously for the victims of those
actions, but also terrible for the people who make the mistakes. We
think we can trust our eyes, that our eyes tell us the truth. But if
your eyes lie to you and then you make a regrettable action based on
that—that’s a terrible thing to happen.”
Even when you’re not
holding a gun, you can be psychologically affected by seeing one. Since
1967, researchers have been observing the “
weapons effect,”
a phenomenon in which the mere presence of a weapon can stimulate
aggressive behavior. Of course, a person doesn’t respond to a gun the
way a cartoon bull reacts to the matador’s cape—we aren’t spontaneously
enraged every time we notice a firearm. But empirical research has
repeatedly shown that, when people are
already aggravated, seeing a gun will motivate them to behave more aggressively.
Imagine
you’ve volunteered to participate in a study on a college campus. You
arrive to find the lab somewhat cluttered—there’s a badminton racquet
and some shuttlecocks on a table. The researchers tell you to ignore
that stuff—it’s for a different study. They hook you up to a machine
that administers electric shocks, and hand the controls to another
participant like yourself. He zaps you. Repeatedly. (He’s secretly part
of the research team, following specific instructions—but as far as you
know he’s just being a jerk.) Now it’s your turn to zap him. How many
shocks will you administer?
Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage repeated this
experiment
with 100 male students at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes
replacing the badminton equipment with a revolver and shotgun (or no
stimulus at all). They found that participants administered more
electric shocks when in the presence of guns. According to Berkowitz and
LePage, the weapons were “aggressive cues.”
A later
study
at the University of Utah refined our understanding of the weapons
effect. Psychologists watched the behavior of drivers stuck at an
intersection behind a truck that wouldn’t budge when the light turned
green. Sometimes there was a gun displayed in the truck’s rear window
and sometimes there wasn’t. The researchers observed that people honked
more often when they saw the gun.
Even when nobody has been
tormenting you with electric shocks or inciting your road rage, they
found, you’ll react to a gun differently than you’d react to other
objects in your environment. You’ll automatically see the gun as a
threat, without even realizing it.
“The ‘threat superiority
effect’ is the tendency for people to be able to pick out very quickly
in their environment things that might pose a threat to their
security—anything that might be dangerous,” explains Isabelle
Blanchette, a professor of psychology at the University of Quebec.
“People have a tendency to be able to see these things before they see
other things.”
Psychologists have theorized that the threat
superiority effect is a product of evolution—we have adapted the ability
to immediately identify threats like snakes and spiders so we can avoid
them. Blanchette’s
research
shows that people have a similarly quick reaction to seeing a
weapon—we’ll immediately spot a gun among several other distracting
objects.
When you see the threat, your body will respond before
you even think about it. “The most instantaneous thing that happens is
that your pupils will dilate,” Blanchette says. “You can have other
physiological reactions that are associated with fear. There are changes
in your body, such as in your heart rate and respiration rate.”
Last
month, “Liz” (a pseudonym) experienced some of those reactions when she
noticed a group of men with guns gathering just outside Blue Mesa Grill
in Arlington. Liz had organized a lunch meeting for fellow members of
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and open carry activists decided to
protest outside the restaurant with AK-47 and AR-15 rifles. “The only reaction I had was ‘I’m not going out there
at all,’”
Liz says. “They were all carrying rifles. There was a lot of firepower,
and a lot of potential for carnage out in that parking lot. Absolutely I
was scared.”
That sort of fear is what open carry activists say
they want to eliminate over time. In an online list of goals, the open
carry activists at
Come and Take It America say they want “to condition Americans to feel safe around those of us that carry [guns].” The same goal is listed on the
Open Carry Texas
website. Open carry activists are aware that their marches scare
people—they’re used to encounters with police who are responding to
9-1-1 calls. But Grisham says his group tries to maintain good
relationships with local authorities, “in case they do get phone calls
from concerned citizens, they can explain that, ‘no, these guys are just
exercising their rights.’” He believes people will overcome their fears
once they grow accustomed to seeing guns in public. “Our philosophy at
Open Carry Texas is, if we can get people used to seeing AK-47s and
AR-15s and deer rifles and shotguns and .22s and things of that nature,
when we finally get open carry of pistols passed it won’t be such a big
deal.”
Habituating people to guns so that they no longer perceive
any threat, however, might not be prudent. After all, fear can be a
useful survival instinct. “I don’t know to what extent it is beneficial
or even possible to reduce fears that are actually very adaptive or
normal or useful fears,” Blanchette says. Without a fear of snakes, for
example, we might behave more carelessly around them—and get bitten.
Was
it reasonable and appropriate for New Haven residents to feel alarmed
at the sight of William Dong carrying two Glocks as he walked to class?
Should 9-1-1 dispatchers have informed those callers that the man with
the guns was probably just exercising his rights?
In states where
open carry is legal, police must walk a careful line, obliged to respond
to reports of armed men on city streets, but sometimes lacking the
authority to do much when they arrive on scene. Rich Buress, President
of Connecticut Carry, told the
New Haven Register that Dong’s arrest might have been improper. “He didn’t do anything,” Burgess said.
In
Texas, open carry advocates routinely document their interactions with
police. “We put those videos up because we want the community to see
that there’s a police officer approaching a guy with a gun, and he’s not
arresting him, so he must be doing something that’s legal,” Grisham
says. “And also we want other police officers to look at these positive
videos and go ‘oh, so that’s how I have to approach these guys so I
don’t have to be worried about being embarrassed on YouTube.’ But then
there’s the guys who aren’t so respectful of our rights. Those are the
guys who try to impose their authority on us. They try to tell us we
can’t do things we can legally do. So we expose those guys as well.”
Grisham says the Open Carry Texas YouTube channel is also instructional
for members. “It tells our people this is how you should deal with a
police officer that approaches you. Be respectful until you’re
disrespected.”
Open carry activists throughout the country have posted similar videos online. Perhaps the most
haunting and bizarre
is a jittery clip posted last year by Robert Pratt of Michigan. In the
video, Pratt carries a shotgun while walking his dogs through suburban
Plainwell. Two police cruisers intercept him at the curb, and four
officers surround him for a long, tense conversation. One of the cops is
James Pell, who Pratt greets by name—Cassandra Pell, the officer’s
daughter, was Pratt’s girlfriend. The officers try to reason with Pratt,
asking him to go home and put his gun away, because it’s unnecessarily
frightening his neighbors. Pratt says he is “just exercising rights as a
U.S. citizen” and that he would continue to openly carry his gun in the
neighborhood because “people need to be aware of laws.” He cites the
specific state laws and city ordinances that allow him to carry his
shotgun.
This June, Pratt used that same weapon to shoot and kill Cassandra Pell, and then to commit suicide.
Grisham
is quick to point out that most gun owners are not murderers. “99.83%
never commit a crime,” he says. (That number can’t be substantiated,
since there is no complete record of which Americans, or how many, own
guns.) “If people are afraid of guns, just come up and talk to us, just
approach us.”
But the Plainwell shooting, and other violent crimes committed by people who were
legally carrying their weapons,
confirm the worst fears of some opponents of open carry. “Their
perception of what they’re doing is so different than the majority of
people watching them,” says Liz. “They think they’re just showing up
saying ‘see, we’re a bunch of nice guys who just happen to be carrying
around semiautomatic rifles.’ Whereas for people who are out and about
in a suburban area, it’s terrifying—especially considering the climate.”
Regardless
of these fears, and of the potential harms suggested by scientific
research, the real world effects of open carry might soon be tested in
the largest lab yet—the state of Texas, where it’s not currently legal
to openly carry modern pistols.
Greg Abbott,
the frontrunner in the Texas gubernatorial race, praised the Texas
legislature this year for expanding gun rights, and for lowering the
minimum training required for a concealed handgun license from 10 hours
to just 4. Asked in a recent
interview whether he supported open carry, Abbot answered “yes.”
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