My wife and I were
Armed & (not)
Dangerous in six different states last week on our trip to Oklahoma, instead of just staying home to endanger the good folks of Delaware. My ratty but fully functional 2001 Police Interceptor is now, officially, Barely Broken In:
(The carry ammo in my Glock 29 has over 50,000 miles on it... should I trade IT in)?
With our CCDW permits and non-resident PA LTCF's, we were legal in every state except one. On the way out, we spent the night in Terre Haute, locking our guns in the trunk the next morning to drive across Illinois. On the way home, we unloaded & secured the guns at our first gas stop south of St. Louis, and reloaded them at the Indiana Welcome Center.
The trip home was 1250 miles straight through, arriving Monday at 3:45 AM. We were @@@@ glad to be armed a few times in Pennsylvania: there was a bunch of loud drunks arguing at a gas stop south of Pittsburgh, and an "urban" mob at the Midway Service Plaza would have scared us off if we had noticed them before we got out of the car. In both cases, we kept to ourselves and drove on without incident, but knowing we had self-defense options made it much less frightening.
Thanks to the good people of handgunlaw.us for providing up-to-date .PDF summaries of state gun laws. We printed them out for every state on the trip, put them in a binder for reference, and checked it often. Just being able to
immediately find out whether we could carry in restaurants serving alcohol in Indiana and Oklahoma was worth the trouble and minor expense. (We didn't drink, of course).
The question we asked ourself (and we should all ask ourselves daily), each & every time we started the Ford:
"Can we produce our ID, vehicle documents, and carry permits without taking our hands out of sight?"Each time, before we moved the car, we made sure the answer was Yes.
