I have reasons I’m not a huge fan of open carry. However, those are personal reasons and, as such, I support the right for people to do it. After all, how can I protect my right to carry how I choose if I refuse to support the right for people to carry in a way I don’t necessarily like?

In Edgewater, Colorado, at least some felt differently. They wanted to end open carry for good.

Unfortunately for open carry advocates, that effort worked.

With only one dissenting vote, the city of Edgewater has officially banned the open carry of firearms, with at least one city council member attempting to tie the carrying of guns to white supremacy.

Edgewater is a metro-area home rule city of just over 5,000 people bordered by Denver to the east, Lakewood to the south and west, and Wheat Ridge to the north.

At a June 7 meeting, Councilmember Hannah Gay Keao — who doubles as a Mom’s Demand Action gun control activist — suggested language be added to the ordinance stipulating that gun violence can be mostly attributed to white supremacy, a trait at least one other council member then connected to right-of-center political ideology.

It’s attributed to what now?

That’s right. White supremacy.

“I would propose the language say, ‘Whereas the city council finds that open carrying of firearms, during the times of civil protest and unrest tends to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the harm of white supremacy and the potential for violence and death.’”

Councilmember Liam Donevan agreed with Gay Keao but said he didn’t think it fit in this ordinance.

“Overwhelmingly, mass shootings are perpetrated by individuals who are motived by a far-right ideology and white supremacy,” Donevan said. “I agree this is an essential and important part of that conversation, I just don’t know if that is part of the impetus for this specific legislation and the goal of our efforts more broadly.”

Donevan offered no data to back up his claims about mass shootings.

That’s because no such data exists.

Look, in the wake of a mass shooting, people want to find some link between the killer and their opposing ideology. Take the El Paso shooter. Leftists jumped on the anti-immigrant message posed by the killer while the right latched on to his environmentalism.

The truth was that, at his core, it was a nutbar.

That’s also true of many other mass killers. They don’t have a dedicated ideology to speak of other than killing innocent people.

Yes, there are exceptions, but they’re just that, exceptions.

Further, though, none of the mass shooters were just innocently open carrying a gun until they decided to slaughter innocent people. That’s literally never happened and trying to claim it has is insane.

Yet this is an important lens into the thought processes of anti-gun activists. Many actually believe this is white supremacy. They think anything but progressive orthodoxy is white supremacy, that gun ownership is white supremacy. Is it really difficult to see them viewing open carry the same way?

For folks in Edgewater, you have my sympathies. Too bad your local government doesn’t value your rights and is quick to call you all sorts of vile things. You deserve better.