Open carry advocates in Texas plan to educate attendees at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Friday about the state’s newly enacted gun laws hours before President Obama is scheduled to speak at the annual music and technology festival in Austin.
Festival policies prohibit attendees from bringing weapons into venues during the weeklong event, but legislation that went into effect on January 1 allows individuals to freely carry rifles and shotguns most anywhere else in the Lone Star State.
C.J. Grisham, the leader of the gun rights group Open Carry Texas, told KEYE TV in Austin that the festival provides the perfect opportunity to educate people about the two-month-old law.
“We’re focused on getting people used to seeing what a holstered handgun looks like and focus on the person not just a piece of metal on my hip,” Mr. Grisham told the CBS affiliate this week.
“It allows us to really engage with a younger population of people. SXSW attracts a lot of the younger generation,” he added.
Indeed, festival organizers say the interactive portion of lat year’s event was attended by more than 33,000 participants from 85 countries, half of whom were under the age of 35.
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“We will be handing out educational literature and constitutions, talking about the new law, and basically showing attendees that gun owners are no different than anyone else,” Open Carry Texas said through its Facebook page. “We simply refuse to be victims.”
The group plans on gathering at noon on Friday, two-and-a-half hours before Mr. Obama is scheduled to hold a keynote conversation there and become the first sitting president to appear at the event. He’ll discuss “civic engagement in the 21st Century before an audience of creators, early adopters and entrepreneurs who are defining the future of our connected lives,” the festival said in its announcement
“I’m going to open carry my rifle and hand out literature at SXSW Friday,” Mr. Grisham wrote on Facebook, according to the Dallas Morning News. “I just found out Obama is going to SXSW. This may get interesting.”
Mr. Grisham, a retired U.S. Army First Sergeant and candidate for state Senate, told the Morning News that he had to ban a person from the Facebook group after they said with respect to Friday’s events: “If you get a clear shot, fire for effect!”
“I don’t condone violence against anybody unless it’s in self defense,” Mr. Grisham told the paper. “Anybody who calls for the death of anybody else without legal justification is aberrant to me.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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