A man who strolled bristling with firearms through a Georgia supermarket in 2021 prompted a mass panic among shoppers — and presented prosecutors with a still-pending dilemma: Crazy as it sounds, it's not clear that what the gunman did is illegal under Georgia law, which allows people to walk around displaying weapons of war. It's similar to the dilemma that faced prosecutors in Missouri in 2019 when a young man decided to express his Second Amendment rights by brandishing a semi-automatic rifle in a Springfield Walmart just days after the massacre at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart that killed 22 people.

It's easy to deride such dangerous stunts as irresponsible (and they are). But the ultimate irresponsibility is the now-common trend in states' laws that make it difficult for law enforcement to confront even armed-to-the-teeth gunmen until they actually start shooting.

In the Georgia case (as reported recently in The New York Times), Rico Marley, then 22, emerged from a bathroom in a Publix supermarket in Atlanta in March 2021 wearing body armor and carrying six loaded weapons, including an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. Police had been alerted by someone who saw Marley in the bathroom with his arsenal. He was arrested without incident — if what a grand jury would later describe as "panic, terror and the evacuation of the Publix" qualifies as "without incident."

Marley was initially charged with multiple felonies on the allegation he'd been armed during the commission of a crime. But Georgia's permissive open-carry law made it questionable the charge would stick, since he'd been arrested before he could use the weapons. He was later indicted for misdemeanor reckless conduct.

His gun-rights defenders criticize even that charge. "I mean, all the guy did was be in the store with guns," one told The Times. Which, of course, could have been said of the El Paso mass shooter (or any other) up until the moment the shooting started.

It was a similar story for Dmitriy Andreychenko, 20, who entered the Missouri Walmart in camouflage and carrying an AR-15-style rifle, a handgun and 100 rounds of ammunition. After his arrest (without incident), he explained he was "testing" his gun rights under Missouri law. He was initially charged with making a terrorist threat, a felony, but later pled down to a misdemeanor.

All's well that ends well? Not always. Consider the 2015 case in which a Colorado Springs woman called police to report seeing a man in her neighborhood with a gun. The dispatcher said police couldn't do anything because Colorado — like Missouri and Georgia and Texas and far too many other states — allows unfettered open-carry.

Minutes later, the gunman killed three people. And police could finally respond. That's the ticking time bomb awaiting the public in jurisdictions like Missouri, which have sacrificed common-sense gun policy on the altar of ideological extremism.

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