The right to bear arms - even in the supermarket

The shootings at Sandy Hook school claimed the lives of 20 children and shocked the world. So why do a growing number of Americans want gun controls relaxed? Alex Hannaford meets the fiery ‘Open Carry’ activists

open carry, second amendment

The song blasts from two speakers placed either side of a beige canopy: “Guns, whether Remingtons and Glocks / Come on man it ain’t like I’m a slingin’ ’em on the block / I’m gonna tell you once, and listen son / As long as I’m alive and breathing, You won’t take my guns.”

Under the canopy is a table full of T-shirts and baseball caps embossed with the words “Open Carry Texas”. And gathered around that are a handful of people with AK-47 or AR-15 semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. In about an hour, their number will have swelled to around 100, and they’ll stand facing the canopy, listening to speakers take turns espousing their rights as gun owners and issuing rallying calls for their supporters to protest what they feel is an attempt by the government – and local law enforcement – to infringe on their constitutional right to bear arms.

We’re in a large car park outside a police station in Harlingen, Texas, a modest city of 65,000 people in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, just 20 miles or so from the Mexican border. The rally has been organised by the same group that printed the T-shirts: Open Carry Texas, a grassroots outfit pushing for guns to be legally carried Wild West-style – in the open, on a holster.

The reason they’re here is this: a month earlier, a 38-year-old electrician called Daniel Romero walked into the centre of Harlingen with a rifle strapped to his back and the police had the audacity to reprimand him for alarming the public. They weren’t going to arrest him; they simply asked him to move on. But Romero refused, the situation escalated and he was strong-armed into the station.

“This is the Harlingen Gestapo!” said an internet user, commenting on the incident. “They will hear us loud and clear when we converge on their headquarters with the exact same weapons. They can bully one man, but try and bully us all!”

As incredible as it may seem to us in Britain, since the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in December 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza gunned down 20 children and six staff, a growing number of people in the United States have been campaigning not for more gun control, but for less. And most of these campaigners have coalesced around the Open Carry movement. This is despite the fact there have been 44 school shootings in the US since Sandy Hook – most of which you’ll have never heard about, so commonplace have they become.

In Texas, it is already legal to carry a rifle on your back, but Open Carry campaigners believe the world would be a safer place if they were allowed to carry handguns in the open as well. Scrolling through Open Carry Texas’s Facebook page the day before the rally, I spot two black-and-white pictures; the first shows a woman carrying a gun, walking down the stairs in her house. “Invaders inside her home,” it reads. “Armed, she can fight and win.” The second picture shows the same woman lying sprawled on the floor below. “Help 20 minutes away,” says the caption. “Disarmed, beg for easy death.” Victoria Montgomery, the public relations officer for Open Carry Texas, has posted her own message below it: “This is why, as a pregnant woman, especially, I feel the need to arm myself wherever I go.”

When I arrive at the Harlingen police station an hour before the rally, Montgomery is standing with the group’s founder, C J Grisham, a soldier based at the nearby Fort Hood military base (a base where two gunmen have opened fire in the past four years, one of them earlier this month, killing a total of 16 people). Grisham is wearing a T-shirt with a photo of a gun in a holster on the side and from a distance it looks real. Montgomery (I’ll discover later, when she shows me) also has an image of a gun in a holster – but hers is tattooed on the side of her body.

victoria montgomery, open carry texas

Victoria Montgomery, publicity manager for Open Carry Texas, says people have an 'irrational fear' of guns

Grisham says Romero was arrested because some members of the public were alarmed, but that he had done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law. “The open carry of long arms is unregulated in Texas. The only law that applies in this case is ‘disorderly conduct’ or ‘trespass’.” Grisham says Romero was engaging in neither.

As supporters begin pulling up in the car park, I talk to Montgomery. The wife of a soldier, she is a former radio operator for her local police department and says she has always been a law-abiding citizen – and a gun lover. “The law as it stands allows me to openly carry my AK-47. And as a pregnant woman and a military wife, it’s a visual deterrent. Criminals don’t want to risk their lives. But the truth is we don’t want to open carry our ARs or AKs. It’s a burden. It’s much easier to exercise our rights with a 9mm.”

The law changes from state to state, but in Texas if you want to carry a pistol with you (almost) wherever you go, you need to apply for a Concealed Handgun Licence (CHL). This costs about $140 (£85) and you have to undergo five hours of instruction and pass a shooting test. Montgomery, however, says she shouldn’t have to pay to exercise her Second Amendment rights.

“I own two Great Danes and I walk them through my neighbourhood,” she says. “They’re not aggressive. They’re not snarling. But people still go back inside their houses, scared, when they see them. Does this mean my dogs are going to attack them? No. They’re big babies. If I have a rifle on my back and you retreat into your house, my rights should not be given up because you have an irrational fear.”

But what about Sandy Hook, I ask? What about the “Batman” shooting at the cinema in Aurora? After those atrocities there were very loud calls for more regulation of guns, not less. A loud majority was saying something needed to be done. Montgomery agrees something needs to be done – remove gun restrictions. “The movie theatre in Aurora was a gun-free zone,” she says. “And [a gun] could have prevented a situation like that.”

By 12.20pm the crowd is 60-strong. Most have rifles slung over their shoulders. Some wave flags that say “Come and Take It”, a slogan used in the Texas War of Independence in 1835; others have a picture of a rattlesnake with the words “Don’t tread on me”, a flag from the American War of Independence.

Harlingen is almost 80 per cent Hispanic due to its proximity to the Mexican border, but the majority of people here today are 30 or 40-something white men. I count 10 or so women and a handful of children. One of these is Angela Pena, a mother in her late forties with an M6 rifle.

Pena tells me she’s never been politically active, but “over the last year I’ve seen a more and more tyrannical government. You can’t pick and choose how much of the Second Amendment you want. My father was in World War One and we’ve always had weapons in our family. It’s a tradition and it’s part of being an American.”

Pena says she was once forced to draw a concealed handgun in Austin. “I was being followed in a parking lot and he was trying to assault or rob me,” she says. She didn’t have to pull the trigger – the man ran away. “My father’s sacrifices were not in vain,” she says. “These were the rights they bled and died for.”

Romero, when he finally appears, is something of a celebrity. The head of his local branch of Come and Take It, another Second Amendment rights group, he says he came to Harlingen to demonstrate to members of the public and the police that Texans have a right to openly carry long guns. Apparently, he told the police about his intentions two weeks beforehand.

“We didn’t have to ask permission but it was a courtesy call,” he says. “I told them we’d be standing on the sidewalk outside [fastfood restaurant] Chick-fil-A between 11am and 2pm. Then, 15 minutes before the event ended, eight police cars showed up and I was told I would be cited for breach of the peace. They said I was loitering, so I started to walk down the street. They then said I was disrupting the traffic and they surrounded me and placed me in handcuffs, but I was well within my rights. We’re trying to normalise the carrying of guns again. That doesn’t mean we’re breaking the law. An armed society is a polite society.”

It’s Harlingen’s interim police chief Stephen Scot Mayer’s day off today, but he’s been at the rally since it started, milling about in the crowd and looking inconspicuous in sunglasses, jeans, cowboy boots and a T-shirt that reads “Unapologetically American”.

“It’s a difficult situation,” he tells me, “when you have folks engaging their Second Amendment right on one side and, on the other, you have people feeling intimidated and wanting their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s difficult to see how you can pursue happiness if you’re frightened, but it’s about trying to achieve a balance.”

Mayer won’t apologise for how his officers acted the day Romero was arrested. “They used their discretion,” he says. “And I stand by their discretion.”

This push for greater gun freedom isn’t just confined to Texas. Nationally, President Barack Obama’s relatively moderate proposals for expanded background checks for gun buyers, a ban on assault weapons and a ban on high-capacity gun magazines all failed to get the required number of votes in Congress.

And from Florida to California, more and more gun-toting activists have been openly carrying firearms in public places such as coffee shops, restaurants, public parks and political rallies.

open carry, second amendment

Second Amendment activists have been staging rallies all over the United States

Meanwhile, in the first six weeks of 2014 there were 13 school shootings, resulting in the deaths of 28 people. Across the US, gun deaths are set to exceed deaths caused by traffic accidents by next year: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates shooting deaths in 2015 will rise to just fewer than 33,000, while those related to motor vehicles will drop to about 32,000. In just one day – March 2, during the time I was working on this story – 26 people across the US were injured by guns and nine died, according to incident reports collated by the Gun Violence Archive.

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America has been one of the biggest advocates for gun control in the wake of Sandy Hook, and it has become the Open Carry movement’s most tenacious adversary. The organisation was set up by Shannon Watts, a mother of five from Indiana, and what began as a simple Facebook page the day after the shooting is now a registered charity with chapters in every state.

In November, a few members of Moms Demand Action met at a Dallas restaurant when one of them spotted a group of 20 or so men and women in the car park outside carrying shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. It was a counter-demonstration by Open Carry Texas, but the women inside the Blue Mesa Grill claimed it was a show of force designed to intimidate them.

Police made no arrests because the Open Carry group was exercising a right sanctioned under Texas law. C J Grisham told The New York Times at the time his gathering was peaceful and legal and that, “No matter what we do, [Moms Demand Action] is going to label us intimidating. It doesn’t matter how we carry, where we carry.”

Kellye Burke, a mother of two from Houston, joined Moms Demand Action shortly after Watts started the organisation and she now runs the Texas chapter from her home in Houston. What motivated her to join, she says, was a press conference given by Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, a week after Sandy Hook. “He said the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Burke says. “You have a horrible tragedy and then tell everybody the only way to protect yourself is to buy more guns. It’s selling product. It’s very sinister and callous but that’s what it is.”

She says the Open Carry movement is currently “percolating” because it’s primary season in Texas (elections to offices from US Senate to Attorney General) but she doesn’t hold out much hope for sensible gun legislation if any new politicians get in. “Legislators are blind to the reality,” she says.

Far from being anti-gun, Burke says she considers herself pro-Second Amendment; that this battle shouldn’t be pitched as gun lovers versus gun haters.

“I bristle at the gun lobby shrouding themselves in the nomenclature of ‘gun rights advocates’,” she tells me. “I’m just as much for gun rights. But gun rights come with responsibility – and that’s the part completely lacking from the conversation. In Mothers Demand Action we have a lot of members who are politically conservative. But ask them if people should be able to open carry and they don’t want that.”

Burke grew up around guns in Texas. There were rifles and shotguns in her house when she was a child, she says, but she thinks a major change has taken place in the intervening years: “Open carry was originally in the context of hunting; in a rural setting. It’s offensive that this movement has really sprung up since Sandy Hook. Think about how disgusting that is; that their response to a massacre of Americans by their fellow citizens is to parade around with loaded weapons in public in urban settings. I don’t know what message they’re trying to send but these episodes they have are always in suburban areas – outside a Chipotle [restaurant], a Target or in a strip mall; places where women and children go. They’re gun advocates, not gun rights advocates.”

Burke says before the mid-Nineties, when concealed handgun licensing was introduced in Texas, people could carry a gun openly but they didn’t. “It was never an issue. You don’t see old-school Texans doing this; they’d consider it crass behaviour. This is a new phenomenon.”

What Burke and Moms Demand Action want to see, first and foremost, is universal background checks. “Universal means all gun sales and transactions… Those parading around strip malls with guns have a choice. They can have a weapon on them – they can get a Concealed Handgun Licence, but that requires a background check, a little bit of training and a fee. They are choosing a path that’s completely unregulated, with no age restrictions, no training, nothing. What does that tell you about these people?”

Gun rights advocates argue that such restrictions would simply make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to get weapons, whereas criminals will get them regardless. Burke says the notion is ludicrous. “They’re saying there should be no regulation because people are going to break the law. Then we should have no laws for anything. They’re fighting the very thing that is designed to stop the ‘bad guys’ getting guns. If you can pass a background check then why are you flipping out about this?”

It’s January 19, two weeks after the Open Carry rally in Harlingen, and C J Grisham and Victoria Montgomery are standing at the gates to the Texas State Capitol with 100 or so supporters for another rally. There are other Second Amendment groups here today: Gun Rights Across America (GRAA), a national organisation that, a few days earlier, had advertised the rally as taking place at “High Noon”, has also rallied its troops.

“With corruption at every corner and our Second Amendment rights being trampled on,” an online flier for the group read, “GRAA asks you to come out, bring your family, signs, and your unwavering American Pride, and peacefully assemble”.

Once again, most of those present are carrying semi-automatic rifles on their shoulders, but this time Montgomery, who is pregnant, is holding a different sign. This one reads: “I open carry to protect my concealed baby.”

I had asked Kellye Burke whether the time for action in the aftermath of Sandy Hook had now passed; whether once again America had become apathetic about the “gun issue”. Would it, I suggested, take another Sandy Hook to reignite the debate?

“No,” she’d said. “It’s going to take more sensible people getting elected, and more people who care about taking part in the electoral process. The drumbeat is getting louder, and either those politicians are going to change their minds, or they’ll be drummed out of office.”

But the Open Carry movement, which is as vocal in other states as it is in Texas, is digging in its heels. I recalled something Grisham had told the assembled crowd back in Harlingen over the loud hailer: “The best time to open carry,” he said, “is on the anniversary of one of those mass shootings."