I firmly believe that a firearm carried on your person needs to be in a proper holster. I've seen too many examples of people who didn't carry that way shooting themselves unintentionally to feel any other way. I don't like laws dictating it, such as what we have here in Georgia, but it's another example of recognizing something is a good idea right up until you mandate it.
In Texas, NBA player James Harden was arrested over his firearm not being in a holster. What made this dumber, though, was that he wasn't carrying the gun on his person. It was in his car, and Gun Owners of America is less than thrilled to see this transpire.
Cleveland Cavaliers star James Harden was arrested in Houston earlier today on a charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon in a motor vehicle. Texas has always been more lax on gun restrictions than many other states, so the arrest came as a surprise to many.
Harden reportedly broke the law because the gun he had in his vehicle wasn’t in a holster. That reasoning didn’t fly with the gun rights organization, Gun Owners of America (GOA).
In a statement, GOA reaffirmed Harden’s constitutional right to carry and admonished the government for “micromanaging” how anyone secures their gun.
“Texas allows constitutional carry, yet James Harden was arrested because his legally owned firearm wasn’t in a holster in his vehicle. The government has no business micromanaging how a law-abiding citizen secures their own gun,” the organization said in a statement.
While some people might think that Harden was completely out of line for carrying in his car without securing the gun in some manner, others would see this as something that makes a lot of sense, because if you need your firearm while driving, you really aren't going to have time to futz around with a holster that's not secured to you in some way.
And guns don't just accidentally go off unless they're the P320, and even most of those don't just go off. Pretty much every other firearm on the market, though, is absolutely safe sitting on a seat next to a driver or in a center console, just so long as nothing gets inside the trigger guard. A holster does help prevent that, but so does not having anything else in the center console that could possibly get caught up in there and cause a negligent discharge.
There are a ton of ways a gun can be kept in a vehicle, ready to access, that keep it safe but aren't technically a holster, and the state of Texas has no real authority to decide how a firearm should be stored within someone's property.
GOA is right to back Harden in this because he never should have been charged, and not because he's an NBA player. It's because no one should be charged with this silliness. Harden did nothing wrong, even if the situation may have been unwise--and I'm not saying he was unwise, because I don't have the specifics and the cops didn't care about the specifics, most likely--so drop the charges, change the law, and let everyone move on with their lives.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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