The Alexandria police department has its officers going business to business, providing a flyer with **misinformation** on Virginia’s gun laws, targeting mostly open carry.
While true - a business owner can call the police to enforce a trespass charge - it is certainly out of the ordinary for the police come into a business out of the blue and encourage a business owner to infringe on his customer’s civil liberties.
The flyer particularly endangers 18 to 20 year olds as it incorrectly tells a store owner that if they see someone under 21-years-old with a handgun on their hip, that is illegal! That is NOT true and having the police show up on a bogus “man with a gun” call endangers everyone unnecessarily.
The flyer also makes these other FALSE claims about the law, which again could lead to unnecessary man-with-a-gun calls to the police:
- Open carry is not legal in churches
- Open carry is not legal in government buildings (we’ll show that’s not true when we flood their city hall on Saturday, December 13th – see below).
The flyer makes a point of saying that sometimes gun owners hold “demonstrations or events” to raise awareness of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms and those events “may cause alarm” and to call the police.
Aside from the blatant falsehoods, the flyer appears designed to demonize lawful open carry and to confuse and scare the business into calling the police to confront law-abiding gun owners. It does this by citing laws regarding reckless gun handling to paint a frightening image of gun owners brandishing and shooting up his establishment!
http://www.ammoland.com/2014/12/alexandria-virginia-pd-targeting-gun-owners/
