Open Carry in Texas became effective on January 1, 2016, but first, let’s look into what exactly open carry means. To openly carry a gun, one must have a Concealed Handgun License (CHL) or License to Carry. To apply, you must be 21 years or older, go through training courses, pass an active performance test with a gun, and pass a written test. If there are any signs of negative behavior, such as any recent non-violent criminal conviction or even not paying your taxes, you could be disqualified. If the medical database shows you’ve been on prescription drugs for daily function or your own sanity, you may not receive a CHL.

Now, after receiving a CHL, and being able to openly carry a weapon in the State of Texas, there are still limitations to where you can carry a gun. Any private property in Texas can ban open carry on their premises. It is within their legal rights to ban open carry for any reason. Also, schools and government buildings ban weapons inside their buildings. If any licensed gun holder violates the request of no guns on a certain property, they could get their license revoked and face criminal charges. Furthermore, police officers have the right to ask you for identification to prove that you have a handgun license. Failure to do so will lead to serious consequences. It is clear that open carry is serious business, requires great responsibility, and is not to be taken lightly.

It is very hard to estimate the amount of guns per person in America because there is no universal gun registry in the United States. The FBI doesn’t keep track of gun regulation and trading, which makes it hard to compare to other countries.

The media tends to portray that guns are causing extreme amounts of deaths in our society, but that is wrong. Gun violence was not included in the top ten causes of death in America. According to the CDC, the number of deaths by a firearm in 2013 was 33,636. However, 20,000 of these were suicides. Therefore the number of gun violence deaths in 2013 was approximately 13,636. That may seem like a large number, but it is only 0.00004 percent of the American population. In fact, more people were killed by a car that year than firearms.

Open carry is necessary because the only thing that is going to stop a gun is a gun. When a criminal wants to go out and shoot innocent people, nothing is going to stop him except for someone else with a gun, and to the surprise of some people, the criminal does not care about gun laws or gun control. Open carry was put into place for people’s protection, therefore the only people who will follow gun laws are law-abiding citizens, so why restrict them? If you are scared of being a victim to gun violence, I strongly encourage you to exercise your second amendment right and purchase a firearm. If for whatever reason you forfeit that right, don’t instead try to abridge the rights of others.

Criminals will do whatever it takes to commit their crime, and a gun-free zone will not stop them either, which leads to the next problem. Since at least 1950, all but two mass public shootings have occurred in places where citizens are banned from carrying firearms, or a gun-free zone. However, after every public shooting, President Obama has called for more gun-free zones, creating a shooting range for the mentally insane who carry out these horrific crimes. Open carry will reduce gun-free zones and give the mentally insane individuals less of an opportunity to kill.

          Between 1990 and 2000, there were 42 incidents of mass murder, and between 2000 and 2010, there have been only 26 incidents of mass murder. That is a 40 percent decrease in mass shootings. In fact, your chances of getting shot in a mass shooting are equal to being struck by lighting. The epidemic of mass murder is not increasing, and left-wing politicians use mass shootings to their advantage for political gain with stricter gun control.

The focus of reducing mass murders has two factors: open carry and mental health. As explained above, open carry will deter criminals from doing heinous crimes by striking fear into the criminal’s eyes before they commit the crime and retaliation from gun holders nearby during the crime. Mental health is also a leading cause of mass public shootings. A study done by Mother Jones found that out of 61 mass shooters in the past 30 years, at least 38 “displayed signs of mental health problems prior to the killings.” This statistic shows that mass murders are not a normalcy and that it’s something beyond a stable condition of the mind.

Despite what the media portrays, there is not a mass shooting every week. Left-wing politicians can try and restrict the second amendment (the right to bear arms) all they want until push comes to shove and the only people with guns are criminals. We live in the United States of America, a country full of freedom, liberty, and rights. By comparison, France has extremely restrictive gun laws and to the shock of many people, France has faced more casualties from mass public shootings in 2015 than the U.S. has suffered during the seven-years of the Obama administration, 532 to 396. The American people need to become aware of the reality that gun violence in America is being twisted and exaggerated, which is carried along by the left-wing political agenda. Open Carry is necessary for all of our own safety and for the safety of others.

Guns have been an integral part of American society and culture ever since Europeans migrated to the New World.

Whether used for hunting, protection, or large-scale violence, firearms have built nations, won wars, and enforced laws but, as seen with the increasing normalcy of shootings and gun deaths in America, guns are also responsible for a despicable amount of deaths.

On Jan. 1, 2016, Texas became the forty-fifth state in America to allow open carry, as a result of a bill signed into law in June by Governor Greg Abbott.

The bill allows those who are licensed to carry a gun to do so in public now, with the exception of gun-free zones like schools and courthouses.

In the grand scheme of things, the issue of open carry does more to sustain reckless gun culture rather than to shape gun control itself like issues of background checks and the actual sale of firearms have.

According to data published by CNN, American ranks number one in most firearms per capita with 88.8 guns per 100 people. Collectively, American civilians own 270 million guns, almost the population of Indonesia, the fourth most populated country in the world.

Even though the advent of open carry is a considered a defeat for gun-control advocates, what’s even worse is that of the forty-five states that allow open carry, Texas is only one of thirteen states that requires a permit or a license to open carry.

That means at the end of the day, Texas is actually more responsible than most other states when it comes to this issue, which is even scarier.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with open carry, if we truly understand the capacity of gun culture to foster violence in our nation, we should treat the distribution and use of firearms with as much precaution as possible.

If it’s any indication of the severity of this issue, the United States has faced an unparalleled 51 mass shootings in the past 19 years.

Many gun-rights activists argue that, as the forty-fifth state to have passed open carry legislation, Texas shouldn’t be surprising anyone with its latest decision.

The Lone Star State has gun culture pumping through its veins and written in its history, all the way back to the Alamo. Nevertheless, carrying out a culture purely because it marks our past is unreasonable. As Texans, we should always be evaluating our principles, pushing for greater integrity, and shaping our state to configure to our developing ethical standards.

Additionally, it is frustrating to see people up in arms about dangerous terrorists “invading” our country when many of the same individuals refrain from advocating measures to reduce deaths by firearms.

Domestic deaths by firearms are responsible for almost 2000 times the number of deaths that terrorism is annually, especially in recent years. In light of that statistic, general American concern seems substantially disproportionate to the actual severity of both terrorism and firearms.

But, of course, while this should be primarily a topic of saving lives, many argue it’s one of saving rights. When considering issues like gun control, it is important to understand the political environment America is experiencing right now.

In the throes of a massive presidential election, with an increasingly stratified political spectrum, and a new shooting in the news what seems like every week, anything having to do with gun control is sensationalized and portrayed as an obstruction of the Second Amendment and a veiled effort to steal the population’s guns.

The right to carry a firearm is right there in the Constitution and that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

However, it is important to recognize that, by making the situation more of pride than of anything else, the culture surrounding firearms considerably obstructs any effective reform that could help to keep our friends, our families, our relatives, our fellow Americans safe from harm.

We must decide whether clinging to our past is worth risking the stability of our future.