Stop "Helping" Us, Kory Watkins

The most effective campaigner for gun control in Texas over the past year isn’t an anti-gun Democrat politician, or one of Michael Bloomberg’s paid shills.

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No, that dishonor goes to a cop-hating anarchist named Kory Watkins, who leads something called Open Carry Tarrant County.

Watkins is one of the knuckleheads that thinks slinging an AK across your back and walking into a store filled with families doing their grocery shopping is going to somehow to normalize or acclimate people to firearms, instead of generating the much more likely response of, “who is this idiot, and what are his intentions? Is he a threat to my family?”

Watkin’s latest stunt is the attempted intimidation of a Texas lawmaker. This was caught on film, prompting the installation of panic buttons in the Texas offices of the Texas legislature.

The Texas House approved rules Wednesday to be able to install panic buttons and eject hostile members of the public from their offices, after a confrontation between lawmakers and open carry advocates visiting the Capitol on the opening day of the 2015 session.

“I think that public servants and members of the public ought to feel safe and secure when they come to the Capitol,” said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who sponsored an amendment to add the safety measures to the house housekeeping rules. “That being said, it came to my attention there was some disagreement as to whether members have to accommodate individuals or groups that are acting in a threatening or belligerent manner.”

On Tuesday, around 15 to 20 members of the group Open Carry Tarrant County visited several lawmaker offices urging them to support House Bill 195, which seeks to undo Texas’ 125-year ban on the open carry of handguns. Several House members, including Democrats Poncho Nevarez of Eagle Pass and Celia Israel of Austin, said the group hassled them or their staff.

In a video posted to Facebook by Kory Watkins, the gun group’s leader, on Tuesday, open carry activists can be heard calling Nevarez “a tyrant to the Constitution” and telling him he “won’t be here very long, bro.”

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Yes, Watkins issued a veiled threat to a politician, in public, while being recorded.

Thanks, Kory. You’ve done it, yet again.

Though it’s completely unfair to the vast majority of gun owners to be judged by your idiocy, anti-gun media and gun control groups are going to seize on your unhinged behavior and exploit it as they have so many times in the past.

Watkins and Open Carry Tarrant County have consistently portrayed gun owners in a negative light. They are the inadvertent stars of the gun control movement, and Watkins is arguably the best thing that ever happened to Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action.

Moms Demand was well on its way into fading into obscurity with the other has-been gun control groups when OCTC’s obnoxious practice of open carrying rifles into various restaurants and retail stores breathed new life into the group, giving them a cause to rally against. The various Moms Demand campaigns targeting national restaurant chains and nationwide stores to ban open carry are a direct result of the tactical failures of Open Carry Tarrant County.

One would hope that this latest failure would be enough to cause Watkins to change his ways, but I assure you that it will not. He loves the attention he draws to himself, no matter what that attention does to the rest of the gun rights movement that he claims to support, but so frequently sabotages.

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C.J. Grisham of Open Carry Texas has gone so far as to describe Watkins as a “cancer.” I think that’s unfair.

Cancer can’t change its ways. Kory Watkins could. He simply refuses to do so.

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