Licensed gunowner arrested in Colo.

Ahhh, shades of Culver's in Madison, Wisc.

James Mapes, 48, was arrested in a Denver-area movie theater Saturday night while legally carrying a gun that he has carried without problems since 2003. He has a concealed-carry permit from a sheriff's department in Colorado (coincidentally the same sheriff's department where I was a reserve deputy in the late 1970s), and Colorado is, according to the news article, an open-carry state (like Wisconsin).

Read the whole article in the Denver Post online.

Some do-gooder got carried away and called the police. Understandably, cops and movie theater personnel are on edge, in light of what happened in the Denver area about a week before.

Wisconsin has a smart Attorney General. He ruled a while back that a person should not be "alarmed and disturbed" by the sight of an openly-carried firearm, absent any threatening actions by the gun bearer. The Madison Police who went off half-cocked and arrested five men in Culver's got their own lunch eaten, after the Madison Five were released of all charges.

Let's hope the City of Thornton in Colorado exercises the same wisdom. Was Mapes right to carry?

Well, would you want to be in a theater, unarmed and defenseless, if an armed person came in and started shooting?