This is an encounter between a member of Open Carry Texas and an officer of the Houston Police Department.

Curiously, both gun rights groups and gun control groups are using this video, and the videos from other open carry activist interactions, to push for their quite different agendas.

Open carry activists say that they want to point out that open carry is legal, and hope to win converts—or at least grudging tolerance—from the general public.

Gun control supporters call these activists “extremists,” pointing out that these sort of protests scare the general public, and that the time officers have to spend reacting to these calls is time they should be spending attempting to stop actual crimes.

Many average citizens, including gun owners, tend to share the view that these displays are counterproductive, and the simple fact of the matter is that these displays have lead to both rule changes and laws that ban all open carry in either specific areas (such as banning open carry in legislative buildings and offices) or in entire states (California).

Open carry walks such as these are clearly designed to elicit calls from citizens to police to provoke a confrontation, but do you see this as something helping or hindering the spreading of gun rights?