We’re all packin’

One of the best speeches from today at the Texas GOP convention was from Jerry Patterson, land commissioner and 2014 lieutenant governor hopeful.  Here was one of his jokes:

Patterson, the author 17 years ago of the state’s concealed weapon law, said he noticed how courteous everyone was at the convention hall. If someone accidentally bumped someone else, it’s been, “Excuse me,” with the other fellow responding, “no, excuse me.” He said the politeness was overwhelming until he figured it out: “We’re all packin’,” he said.

He went on to explain that 17 years ago, all the papers and liberty-haters were exclaiming how there would be blood running down the streets from all the violence caused by citizens legally carrying guns.  This is a pretty typical liberal reaction, but the truth is that violent crime has gone WAY down in the past 17 years.

Now, I said all that so I could say this:

On the way out of the arena this afternoon, I bumped into another man.  I said ‘excuse me’, then jokingly repeated the ‘no, excuse me’ part of Patterson’s joke a few times.  The guy smiled at me and said, “hey, don’t mess with me, I’m packin’ “.  I responded with “well, so am I”.  He gave me another smile and said, “no, I’m serious”, and so I said, “so am I!”

True Story!  It made me wonder just how many of the 11,000 or whatever it was people there were taking the responsibility of self protection as serious as the two of us did.