We don’t need to know. We’re free to think what we want, even if we’re wrong. But seriously, if I see somebody mowing their own lawn while wearing a sidearm, I’d think they’re irrational and paranoid. If your home is in such a dangerous neighborhood, or if you have such serious threats against you, that you have good reason to feel it’s unsafe to go out in your own yard in broad daylight without a sidearm, you should probably be focusing on more urgent matters than shortening the grass. If you’ve got two hands on the mower, and are repeatedly changing directions as you mow so that your back is periodically facing any direction in which an attacker might be lurking, and are right next to loud noise of the mower so that you can’t hear someone sneaking up on you, you can be picked off quite easily. Lawn-mowing is pretty incompatible with protecting yourself from an immediate threat. Now if there’s snarling pit bull in an adjoining yard, it might well make sense to have the sidearm handy whenever you’re out in your yard, and that scenario would change my personal assessment of the armed homeowner-mower’s mental state — would probably change the author’s assessment too.
Well, if only you could make everyone’s personal decisions for them then the world would be correct.
You’ve got real problems with people being able to make their own choices, and I base that on what you wrote in your last response. The fact that you consider a person who is exercising both a federally-protected and state-protected constitutional right to be armed, to be irrational and paranoid, tells me you are not a pro-2nd amendment person, and that the right to self defense is a foreign concept to you.
The fact you fail to understand that if a person has a right, they don’t have to explain it or justify it or ask permission of anyone else to exercise it. If someone attacks me I don’t need permission to defend myself. If I want to carry a weapon for self protection I don’t need to justify it with anybody else, because I have a right to do so.
How would you like to have to explain and justify to a police officer, why you are going to church?
How would you like to HAVE to explain to an officer your reasons for showing up to vote?
You have these protected rights (freedom of religion, ability to vote as a law abiding citizen over 18), yet are those people who eercise these rights ‘paranoid’ and ‘irrational’? Atheists will argue that the religious folks are irrational.
The fact people may be uncomfortable about certain people wanting to exercise their rights that they’ve had for hundreds of years - because realize this opinion did not change the existing laws, it just commented on them - does not make those people irrational and paranoid. Unarmed law abiding people are killed and preyed upon by criminals, and it happens every day, and we see the stories reported on every day. Rapes, robberies, murder, assaults by armed felons against unarmed law abiding citizens. It is not paranoid to not want this to happen to you, and to be able to defend oneself within the law.
Do you believe police officers are paranoid and irrational for carrying weapons? Many of them, especially in suburbs, have never pulled their gun. The same piece of the state constitution that allows citizens to carry a weapon in the open is the same section that allows police to wear a weapon in the open. The weapon is there IN CASE THEY NEED IT. That is the same reason why law-abiding gun owners wear their weapon - IN CASE THEY NEED IT.
You are the kind of person that may actually have to be a victim of gun violence in order to change your mind about this. I hope you can figure it out without that happening to you.
And I would actually say that it would be irrational to assume being attacked would NEVER happen to you and to go unarmed all the time. It would be more irrational to believe the police will always be there to protect you. Because in the real world, people who never think they will get attacked, get attacked, and people who naively believe police will keep them safe, die after calling 911 and waiting for the police to arrive.
When seconds count, the police are minutes away. And you’ve become a statistic. And possibly worm food.