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legislators to put a stop to it. *
    Regardless of what it did for the gun-rights movement, open carry, I figured, could be the answer to my camouflage problem. NRA caps were nice, but nothing said “gun guy” like a gun. A loaded revolver on my hip would make my bona fides beyond question. I took from the safe the biggest, most ostentatious handgun I owned—a 1917 Smith & Wesson .45 revolver—slid it into its holster, hung it on my belt, and checked my look in the mirror. Unironed blue oxford shirt, thrift-store wool pants, crewneck sweater with snowflakes, and an antique Army pistol the size of a trumpet. The muzzle almost reached my knee.
    Colorado law may have been fine with me walking around with a hog-leg on my hip, but I answered to a higher authority: Margaret. We had been married since 1987, and she was a boy’s pal—willing to camp in the snow, hitchhike across Tanzania, and swim naked at inappropriate places and times. She was devoid of material cravings, could hold her liquor, anddeployed her brain to devastating conversational effect. She was, above all, as willing as I was to risk a tenuous fortune on a harebrained scheme. I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive partner—as long as my proposals weren’t extravagantly stupid or potentially catastrophic. Strutting about displaying a loaded gun, I worried, might qualify.
    It’s safe to say that my gun thing was not the quality that Margaret found most attractive in me. Born of deep peacenik, Northern California stock, she had an instinctive aversion to firearms. She was willing to shoot with me on occasion and even hunt, but the less she had to see and acknowledge my guns, the better. Also, we lived in Boulder, a university town so achingly liberal that its city council once argued for three days over whether people were “owners” or “guardians” of their pets. (Guardians won.) The thought of me strolling around Boulder with a loaded handgun as plumage did not go over well with Her Majesty.
    “For Christ’s sake,” she said as I headed for the door, strapped.
    “Gotta try it,” I said.
    “Don’t get killed. Don’t get arrested. Don’t cause a riot.”
    “Keep your phone on in case I need bail money.”
    I rode my bike first to Home Depot, a manly place where I figured my gun was least likely to scatter people in panic. I removed my coat, draped it over my left arm to make my right side completely visible, and strode through every aisle: tools, electrical, housewares, plumbing. Bracing to be tackled by the burly guys in lumber, I got no reaction at all. People walked by me, chatting to each other, paying no mind. Maybe the big leather holster looked too much like a carpenter’s belt. After twenty uneventful minutes, I pedaled over to Target, which was full of women and children, and got the same nonreaction. I watched people’s faces. If they even noticed the enormous pistol hitched over my thigh, they didn’t let on. It was getting a little frustrating. I planted myself in front of a uniformed security guard by the cash registers and fumbled around in the bargain bins. He had to have seen the gun, but he said nothing. Apparently a balding, middle-aged man in scratchy pants and glasses rummaging through Post-it notes and leftover Halloween decorations with a tired old gun on his hip was not a particularly threatening sight. Maybe he figured I was some kind of cop or a ranger from the city’s vast open-space parks system.
    I tried the Apple Store next, where young clerks in rectangular-framed glasses and identical blue T-shirts stood right beside me as I played with an iPad for half an hour. It wasn’t possible that they didn’t see the big handgun. My guess is that it simply didn’t interest them. A World War Irevolver is pretty dull technology compared with a touch-screen device running a 1GHz A4 chip and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi.
    Finally, I steeled myself for the toughest test of the day: Whole Foods. If I couldn’t get a rise out