Nancy R, at Excells At Nothing, makes a good point. There was a lot of open carry of firearms seen at the NRA convention, and some folks look down on open carry because “it will scare the soccer moms”. Now, it may. Certainly there was a kerfuffle in Philly where it scared a cop, and there have been incidents in WI (where only open carry is legal). But Nancy makes a good point: namely is the weapon in a proper holster?
As a general rule foresight and impulse control aren’t big in the criminal population. As such, they are flying by the seat of their pants through life, really, and don’t plan ahead. Criminal’s guns are usually in bad shape, in my experience. Cheap, poorly maintained, rusty, passed around from hand to hand, rarely cleaned. These folks are not the kind to spend $35 on an inexpensive holster (or $70-150) for a custom one. If they had that sort of money, they’d spend it on other things.
As a general rule, street criminals aren’t wearing collared shirts and ties. White collar criminals, sure, but not street types, and your white collar criminal is a problem, but is not going to threaten you with anything other than a pen.
Door-To-Door Doctoring
According to this story, people in Turkey are dressing up as doctors and doing door-to-door hypertension screenings. They discover high blood pressure, give the people pills to treat the high blood pressure, but they are powerful sedatives and the criminals ransack the house while their victims are passed out. The police replicated the experiment with placebos, and 86% of the people took the pills.
The moral of the story is, don’t take candy from strangers, and don’t take drugs from doctors going door to door. Do you really need to be told this?