I have used this story from Bob Owens, Author at Bearing Arms in it’s entirety but have referenced a link back to the story itself and the Bearing Arms site. A GREAT write-up Bob, every word is the absolute truth and we are standing together in solidarity!
Stop “Helping” Us, Kory Watkins
The most effective campaigner for gun control in Texas over the past year isn’t an anti-gun Democrat politician, or one of Michael Bloomberg’s paid shills.
No, that dishonor goes to a cop-hating anarchist named Kory Watkins, who leads something called Open Carry Tarrant County.
Watkins is one of the knuckleheads that thinks slinging an AK across your back and walking into a store filled with families doing their grocery shopping is going to somehow to normalize or acclimate people to firearms, instead of generating the much more likely response of, “who is this idiot, and what are his intentions? Is he a threat to my family?”
Watkins latest stunt is the attempted intimidation of a Texas lawmaker. This was caught on film, prompting the installation of panic buttons in the Texas offices of the Texas legislature.
The Texas House approved rules Wednesday to be able to install panic buttons and eject hostile members of the public from their offices, after a confrontation between lawmakers and open carry advocates visiting the Capitol on the opening day of the 2015 session.
“I think that public servants and members of the public ought to feel safe and secure when they come to the Capitol,” said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who sponsored an amendment to add the safety measures to the house housekeeping rules. “That being said, it came to my attention there was some disagreement as to whether members have to accommodate individuals or groups that are acting in a threatening or belligerent manner.”
On Tuesday, around 15 to 20 members of the group Open Carry Tarrant County visited several lawmaker offices urging them to support House Bill 195, which seeks to undo Texas’ 125-year ban on the open carry of handguns. Several House members, including Democrats Poncho Nevarez of Eagle Pass and Celia Israel of Austin, said the group hassled them or their staff.
In a video posted to Facebook by Kory Watkins, the gun group’s leader, on Tuesday, open carry activists can be heard calling Nevarez “a tyrant to the Constitution” and telling him he “won’t be here very long, bro.”
Yes, Watkins issued a veiled threat to a politician, in public, while being recorded.
Thanks, Kory. You’ve done it, yet again.
Though it’s completely unfair to the vast majority of gun owners to be judged by your idiocy, anti-gun media and gun control groups are going to seize on your unhinged behavior and exploit it as they have so many times in the past.
Watkins and Open Carry Tarrant County have consistently portrayed gun owners in a negative light. They are the inadvertent stars of the gun control movement, and Watkins is arguably the best thing that ever happened to Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action.
Moms Demand was well on its way into fading into obscurity with the other has-been gun control groups when OCTC’s obnoxious practice of open carrying rifles into various restaurants and retail stores breathed new life into the group, giving them a cause to rally against. The various Moms Demand campaigns targeting national restaurant chains and nationwide stores to ban open carry are a direct result of the tactical failures of Open Carry Tarrant County.
One would hope that this latest failure would be enough to cause Watkins to change his ways, but I assure you that it will not. He loves the attention he draws to himself, no matter what that attention does to the rest of the gun rights movement that he claims to support, but so frequently sabotages.
C.J. Grisham of Open Carry Texas has gone so far as to describe Watkins as a “cancer.” I think that’s unfair.
Cancer can’t change its ways. Kory Watkins could. He simply refuses to do so. Stop “Helping” Us, Kory Watkins - Bearing Arms
“A cop-hating anarchist” was ALL I needed to hear, and this is NOT the first time I have heard those words used to describe Kory Watkins.
Back last Spring I ran into a group of them here in Rowlett at the Home Depot. They were mostly ill-dressed slobs that looked like something from the set of a movie about moonshiners and hillbillies. They looked bad, we’re not good spokesmen in any way and to top it off, on of them was walking a nasty looking Pit Bull everywhere they went.
Their message was a fair request I believe, Open Carry is a topic near and dear to MY heart, but their presentation sucked and Kory Watkins acting like an ASS doesn’t help matters in ANY way!
On my Facebook gun page one of the members compared Watkins and his band of merry men to those Westboro Baptist nuts when he said, “They give gun owners a bad name like Westboro gives Christianity a bit of a black eye.”
If Open Carry is not allowed in this session of the Texas legislature it will be, to a great extent, due to the idiotic actions of people like Kory Watkins and Open Carry Tarrant County.
Good article, and excellent points. Some people just need to know when to sit down and shut up.
Maybe K.Watkins is a plant, I don’t know. I believe strongly that the second amendment means what it says about “shall not be infringed” and my personal belief is that I should decide when and where I wish to be armed. My personal opinion is that open carry may make me an unwitting target of a thug or thugs who could overpower me and gain my sidearm because they don’t have one. People would benefit by reading “The Armed Citizen” in the NRA publications. Always good news there. If there is insufficient public support for groups like OCTC they will likely fade from the limelight.
I was thinking he same exact thing Wayne; he’s a plant. If you want to get the general public scared of guns, act like a fool in public carrying semi-automatic rifles.
It amazes me how these people think their in-your-face approach is going to sway folks to their way of thinking. Their actions even turn off staunch defenders of the 2nd Amendment so you can imagine what it does to those who don’t have an opinion either way.
All the Open Carry folks I ever encountered carried handguns, were never in-your-face, and were polite. They did their business in the store just like any other customer and never harassed anyone.
I’ve seen these clowns on the local news. They act like immature brats and embarass the hell out of me. They are like some of the weirdo “wannabe Sgt Rocks” you see at gunshows.
Several state legislators in both the Texas House and Senate will be introducing constitutional carry bills. I like this. As long as you don’t have a felony record you would be able to carry concealed or open with no special license. It might triple or quadruple the number of armed citizens out in public.
These open carry attention whores will put any carry legislation at risk. This wimpy fucker Watkins jeopardizes my desire for either open or constitutional carry. I hope he eventually does something, and he is stupid enough, to earn a felony conviction that zeros out his right to own firearms.
I would overall advocate concealed carry. Potential suspects cannot know for certain if you are carrying or not. For me to know and them to find out.
BZ
My sentiments exactly.
I think the same way.
I’m Texan to the bone. Have been raised around racks filled with guns since I was a toddler. I have zero fear of my fellow Americans openly carrying firearms of any kind. My figuring is that someone intent on using a gun for bad, is likely not going to be carrying it in a holster or strapped across their backs. But, the actions of these nut cases detailed above, would likely serve to reverse much of what I said above.
Mike, thank you for commenting, I feel the same way too.. My father was a gunsmith, we had guns in the house all the time, his *shop* was in a spare bedroom for a long time… Carry open or concealed, makes me no real difference but these idiots at OCTC have threatened lawmakers in Austin, Dem lawmakers, but lawmakers none the less, and that is the most stupid move they could make…