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Forty-five states permit open carry of guns. ... Earlier this month, on the heels of the Dallas shooting that left five officers dead, Police Chief David Brown suggested that open carry had made the task of identifying the shooter harder.
"We're trying as best we can as a law enforcement community to make it work so that citizens can express their Second Amendment rights," Brown said at a recent media event. “But it’s increasingly challenging when people have AR-15s slung over their shoulder and they’re in a crowd. We don’t know who the good guy is versus the bad guy when everyone starts shooting.”
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Norm Stamper, a 34-year veteran police officer and former chief of the Seattle police department, says open carry can add an element of confusion to police work, hampering suspect IDs at crucial moments.
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“Not a single one of these people carrying firearms out there in [Dallas] caught this guy in what he was doing,” Bob Gualtieri of the Florida Sheriffs Association told Reuters. “It drained law enforcement resources and subjected citizens to being unnecessarily taken into custody, and I think we should all be very grateful that nobody else got hurt.”
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Police in a number of cities have been less easy to shut down, pushing back on open carry when the issue arises. During the legislative debate over a proposed open carry bill in Florida last year, the Fraternal Order of Police expressed its unanimous opposition to the legislation, and the Florida Sheriffs Association made sure legislators were aware that 70 percent of its membership was against the law. The bill died earlier this year. When Texas was considering an open carry law last year, the Texas Police Chiefs Association pointed to a study that showed 75 percent of respondents gave the pending legislation a thumbs down. (In total, about one-fifth of the state’s police chiefs responded to the poll.) Perhaps most surprising, former Texas governor Rick Perry expressed apprehension about the pending law at the time, telling the Texas Tribune he was “not necessarily all that fond of this open carry concept.” That bill was signed into law by current Texas governor Greg Abbott in June 2015.
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Similarly, in Milwaukee, Wis., police at every level have made multiple attempts to push back on open carry laws. The state has longstanding, lenient gun legislation, including open carry, though police were still disarming open carrying citizens and charging them with disorderly conduct as recently as 2009. In response, the state attorney general issued an advisory reiterating the practice’s legality, to the dismay of police across the state. “It's going to be like the Wild West, where they have the holster strapped down to their leg,” Detective Dala Milosavljevic of the Cudahy Police Department told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time.
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