The Hartford Courant has this article and video Video Shows State Police Discussing How To Charge Protester.

Picard told The Courant Thursday that he was standing near a state police DUI enforcement checkpoint near the on-ramp to I-84 on Park Road at about 7 p.m. holding a sign that read “Cops ahead. Keep calm and remain silent.” He said he also had a handgun visible in a holster on his waist because Connecticut is an open-carry state and he had a valid permit for the gun.

What this really shows is that some state laws lead to a paradox. Picard was legally and openly carrying a weapon. It is also true that people openly carrying weapons logically scares the hell out of people. Is there a solution.

I know the feeling of the passers-by. I was driving home from work in Oregon one day. Less than half a block from my house there was a teenager standing in his driveway aiming a rifle toward the spot in the street that I was about to pass by. I took a detour and notified the police. What do you think I should have done instead? Should I have just continued to drive, and hope to hell I wasn’t going to get shot? Should I have taken the detour, not notified the police, and hoped to hell the next person by wouldn’t get shot?

Then there was the time I was walking to my car in my employer’s parking lot. A person was getting into his pickup truck and momentarily a concealed handgun revealed itself. I knew that guns were forbidden on the property. A call to company security revealed to me that the person wearing the concealed weapon was a security officer employed by my employer.

I maintain that there is a difference between being frightened by people because of the color of their skin or some other ethnic identifier and being frightened by someone carrying a gun, especially one that is about to be aimed at you. In the one case I am suffering from a belief in a stereotype of what someone is (and has no choice about) and an observation about someone who chooses to carry something that does threaten my life.