This Kind Of Open-Carrying Idiot Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

I don’t feel any pity for him at all that he was just thrown in jail after terrorizing his community.

Enid Police Department officers arrested a 35-year-old Hunter man Tuesday after receiving nearly a dozen calls reporting him walking down the road carrying a military-style rifle.

Six 911 calls were made to police about 11:25 a.m., and five non-emergency calls, reporting a man wearing a camouflage jacket with a rifle beneath it. One caller told police it could a have been an AK-47 or a BB gun. Two schools, Prairie View Elementary School and Glenwood Elementary School, were placed on lockdown following the sighting.

Officers Mike Atchley and Brett Moore stopped the man in the area of Willow and Cleveland and identified him as Russell Andrew Anderson.

Anderson told officers he had left a relative’s house in the Willow Lake Addition and was “going for a walk,” said Capt. Jack Morris. Anderson told the officers he did this all the time in the Hunter area and it was his constitutional right to carry his guns.

Witnesses said Anderson was carrying the AR-15 against his chest, but when officers found him he was carrying the rifle by its top handle. Anderson’s rifle was magazine-loaded but not chamber-loaded at the time police made contact with him, according to an EPD news release.

Oklahoma’s Self-Defense Act allows those with permits to carry handguns, which Anderson had two, but does not allow for carrying an assault rifle. The law makes few exceptions for carrying a rifle, such as when hunting or carrying a rifle from a home to a vehicle.

Anderson was taken into custody without incident and was found with three knives, two handguns, the rifle, 11 loaded magazines and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in .223 and .22 calibers. He was arrested on a complaint of unlawful carrying of a weapon, which is a misdemeanor.

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Russell Andrew Anderson

Normal, well-adjusted people don’t just “go for a walk” more heavily armed than a JSOC unit executing a strike against a high-value target overseas. They don’t tool up carrying three guns and 11 magazines to make a a spectacle of themselves, making sure that do so on a public street, near schools, where they will craw the most attention and inspire the most concern.

You know what happens when jerks like Anderson start inspiring terror in average citizens who may not feel strongly about gun rights one way or the other? He turns them against us. They start pushing for laws to ban sane open carry (such as holstered handguns), to restrict where all guns can be carried (openly or concealed), and generally make life difficult for the vast majority of gun owners.

Jerks like Russell Andrew Anderson drive people into the open arms of charlatans and frauds like Shannon Watts.

If we don’t police our own and discourage this asinine behavior, expect to start losing gun rights battles instead of winning them.

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