Talk:History of concealed carry in the United States

Intro has NPOV issues.

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This was the intro before I replaced the word "evolution" with "history":

The history of concealed carry in the United States is the evolution of public opinion, policy, and law regarding the practice of carrying concealed firearms, especially revolvers and semi-automatic pistols.

Public perception on concealed carry vs open carry has largely flipped. In the early days of the United States, open carrying of firearms, long guns and revolvers was a common and well-accepted practice. Seeing guns carried openly was not considered to be any cause for alarm. Therefore, anyone who would carry a firearm but attempt to conceal it was considered to have something to hide, and presumed to be a criminal. For this reason, concealed carry was denounced as a detestable practice in the early days of the United States.

As time went on, however, fewer people carried weapons openly. Today, open carry of firearms, even where explicitly legal, can cause alarm, depending on the location. Further, partly because of ongoing debate about best public safety practices, it is often assumed that those who would practice open carry are attempting to cause an uproar or to invite criticism and debate in the streets. In addition, much advice about defensive tactics point out that, since it is relatively easy to strip a firearm and use it against its owner, firearms carried solely for defense ought to be carried concealed where no one would know that they existed unless the owner had good cause and justification to draw it.

This reads like a narrative and doesn't cite any sources. I think one could make a pretty convincing argument that, while most handguns before 1900 were easily concealable, it was unwieldy and uncomfortable to wear them concealed on a daily basis and so most people simply did not bother to conceal them. If CCW were tactically advantageous, then why do police carry open? Full-sized handguns are generally easier to handle and police generally use them in defense of others or themselves. Carrying concealed is usually practiced as a courtesy and/or because state law does not allow open carry. (Not that I'm an advocate of open carry, but there's an NPOV issue here.) AP295 (talk) 15:23, 15 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Several other firearm-related articles suffer from similar NPOV issues, like Concealed Carry in the United States, which I've attempted to improve but not without great effort and needless disputes with several other editors. It seems like 2A proponents are somewhat underrepresented on Wikipedia (yes, I realize Wikipedia is not a forum for debate but there's hardly a lack of POV pushers), and a less persistent editor might be repelled or discouraged by the sort of reception my edits at Concealed Carry in the United States got on the talk page there. Anyway, the detection and moderation of this narrative style of editing that I often see on articles with NPOV issues is probably amenable to modern NLP techniques and algorithms. Just an idea. AP295 (talk) 19:07, 15 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

I'll probably just remove everything in the lead except the first sentence. It's blatant anti-2A POV pushing. The unsourced claim that open carry is inherently dangerous is also ludicrous. If anyone wants to put the content back, please address the cleanup tags I added before I removed it. AP295 (talk) 13:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

"Constitutional carry" is far more common than "permitless carry"

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@Ggmk9570:, please stop reverting "constitutional carry" to "permitless carry". "Permitless carry" only has 92k results on Google, compared to the 671k of "constitutional carry". It also isn't even common enough to be recognized on Google Ngram. "Constitutional carry" is the far more common term, so Wikipedia should use it, as per WP:COMMONNAME. Oktayey (talk) 17:39, 22 October 2022 (UTC)Reply