If the gun is concealed then it’s a tool you can use if you are ever in the situation where you need it. Which is so exceedingly rare I wouldn’t personally bother but it does exist. If the gun is carried openly then it is a public statement which influences other people’s behavior. Both have benefits and bring complications.
It can do the same things as open carry but without signaling “I have a gun”. Those things can be useful separate from the statement made by open carry. Example: you can kill someone that is a serious threat to you but can also avoid intimidating people you’d rather not intimidate.
IMO the usual non-reactionary reason to carry at all is that you live in a place where dangerous situations come up often enough that you feel the need to have the ability to shoot aggressors to protect yourself and your community. Someone wants to rob you or a neighbor by pointing their own gun to your temple. Someone starts swinging a pipe at you haphazardly and won’t stop. Someone much bigger than you keeps trying to fight you. “Stealth” is often perceived as valuable in this environment. You will have to surprise the aggressors. It’s also harder for someone else to grab your gun from its holster.
Open carry is still very useful, especially as part of an organized cadre protecting an action. One or two people open carrying at an action become targeted by cops. A group of 7 is a deterrent and the cops actually tend to act more cautiously.
When someone attacks you or another person with the intent to fatally injure?
And you consider this likely enough for an expensive purchase and to always carry something that can kill people, including yourself, with incredible ease? People willing to do violence pretty much always just wanna tske your stuff and chances are whatever you have on you, assuming you don’t have an expensive gun, is probably less of a loss than the time and money spent in court if you shoot someone. Also no one really knows how they’ll.panic until they do and it’s just as likely for someone to empty a gun into the sidewalk and get robbed anyway. As far as a guy who just wants to randomly harm people and doesn’t have their own gun? Seems unlikely where people can carry guns, so I guess on the off chance you can be The Good Guy With a Gun who happens to stop a mass shooting, it seems pretty useless and playing into common conservative fantasy. Having a gun is a thing, keeping it on you all the time just in case you get the chance to kill someone feels weird.
