Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings perfectly explained what’s wrong with the Open Carry movement.
Rawlings joined John Dickerson on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” to explain the problems that surfaced Thursday night as police were attempting to subdue the shooter.
“You know, in dealing with the law of gun holding, you can carry a rifle legally, and when you have gunfire going on, you usually go with the person that’s got a gun,” Rawlings explained, explaining why many people were arrested that night. “And so our police grabbed some of those individuals, took them to police headquarters, and worked it out and figured out that they were not the shooters.”
Therein lies the biggest problem with open carry laws. “But that is one of the real issues with the gun right issues that we face, that in the middle of a firefight, it’s hard to pick out the good guys and the bad guys,” he said.
Rawlings continued that those open-carrying complicated the moment when police were trying to stop the shooter. “I wasn’t there real time to kind of see it go on, but the common sense would tell you, you don’t know where the gunfire’s coming from. There were individuals that ran across the gunfire. They were in the body armor, camo gear with rifles slung over their shoulders, so it sure took our eye off the ball for a moment. We got them out of the way, we figured out what was happening, and we did our business.”
“There was also the challenge of sorting out witnesses from potential suspects,” Max Geron, a Dallas police major told the Dallas Morning News.