A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

Guns in a Bank

Pardon me for the terrible pun on Snakes on a Plane in the title but I just couldn't resist. Anyway the main point of this post is to discuss a recent experience my brother had, in a bank, with a gun.

Considering that Arizona is pretty conservative I'm still constantly surprised at how skittish people here are about open-carrying. My brother constantly has his precious Kimber Desert Warrior^[1] with him. Basically if he's not at home or at work it's on his hip.

Today he an unpleasant experience at the local bank. He regularly visits the bank to deposit checks and do other bank-like things all while carrying his gun with him and has never had any trouble with anyone//anything until this point. The employees have never had a problem with it, it was a patron that did.

He was standing in line at the bank waiting for a teller to become available when a woman of unknown age (older than him he said) came into the bank to the merchant teller and promptly said very deliberately to the teller "I'm surprised to see a gun in a bank" the teller was very confused by this and replied with a simple "huh?". The woman then turned around and extended her arm fully to point at my brother and say "Him, he's got a gun", now my brother being generally a quiet guy in public replied very calmly "it's perfectly legal". This of course rubbed the woman the wrong way since she didn't get the kind of reaction I expect she was trying to procure from him, so she scoffed and went about her business.

Not a terrible experience, just supremely awkward for my brother to be confronted like that in a public place where he'd done absolutely nothing wrong but land on the wrong side of a woman who clearly holds distrust for anyone carrying a gun that doesn't also have a badge.

1. Kimber Desert Warrior [↩]