Las Vegas Man Shot With His Own Open-Carry Gun. What Does It Mean?

I’m not a personal fan of open carry. My worry is that either someone would try and grab my gun and use it against me, or some criminal would decide to shoot me first.

Yet I’ll be the first to say that these concerns are largely hypothetical. It’s what I think could happen, not what is statistically likely to happen.

However, as an incident in Las Vegas shows us, just because something’s unlikely to happen, it doesn’t mean it won’t.

Kyle Capucci, 36, is facing an open murder charge following a fatal shooting inside an AutoZone near Charleston and Maryland Parkway.

Capucci is accused of taking a man’s firearm to fatally shoot him. The victim had been exercising his legal right to openly carry the weapon.

According to a newly released arrest report, Capucci, who is transient, was acting erratically before the shooting.

Capucci reportedly claimed that he “had to” shoot the victim, but also apparently thought some imaginary person was a threat to him. In other words, it sure looks like he’s a complete and utter loon who needs to be locked up for both his own protection and the protection of society as a whole.

Now, with this incident still relatively fresh–this happened last week–it would be easy for me to say that this validates all of my concerns about open carry.

Only, it doesn’t.

I mean, it kind of does in that it shows these things can happen. However, it doesn’t in that this is one of the extremely rare cases of it happening. It’s the only one I can recall, though Cam tells me he can remember another incident where someone was shot with the gun they were openly carrying in compliance with the law.

That’s two instances over a lot of years between the two of us.

There may be some who try to use this to call for a prohibition against open carry. Others will use this to validate their own concerns, which mirror my concerns, to decry open carry as an option.

Yet the truth is that this is an outlier. It’s a statistical anomaly in the grand scheme of things. It’s a rare unicorn in the world of self-defense; only, it’s a unicorn with a deadly outcome.

This is a terrible incident, and one with a hint of irony, considering, but it’s not indicative of anything.

I say this as someone who generally doesn’t open carry. I say this as someone who generally advises people to concealed carry because of my own concerns about an incident like this. I try to be honest, and that means not trying to present things as anything but what they are, at least as I see them. I’m biased, sure, but unless we were to find ourselves filling pages upon pages with stories like this one, I don’t see any reason for anyone to change anything unless they just want to.

And I damn sure don’t support anyone trying to restrict how people carry.

This is a data point, but it’s far from conclusive.

What this means is that a bad thing happened that is outside of the norm. That’s all it means. Unless this becomes the norm, there’s nothing deeper to ponder.