Old Dog, I would go one step further: there is one more thing necessary, in my opinion, public perception.
In that, I think, the heyday of civil disobedience is over.
Given the best possible outcome of an organized, open carry event, we would still need our opponents to make a mistake.
One person, in a grocery store with a gun will be perceived as a menace, and will do more to perpetuate the myth of fanatic gun nuts than the Hollywood Bank Shootout did. When the police show up, and put him on his knees, that is the image that will endure: a dangerous criminal, humbled by the overwhelming, wise and kind power of the state, unable to move without permission. The police in this scenario will be the heros, whether to witnesses, to the press, or to John and Jane Doe as they sip coffee and read the morning's coverage of it. They'll cluck their tongues, roll their eyes, and forget about it. They'll be glad he's gone, and thankfull we have such courageous police officers- imagine, going into that store to arrest a man with a gun!
With an organized, well attended event, there will still be a piece missing. This isn't the sixties, and today's police forces are just as savvy, just as intellegent, and just as aware as we are. The days of a grainy, black and white sequence of young blacks being swept off their feet by water cannon are gone. According to the History Channel, many American police agencies don't own and won't use water cannon against crowds for precisely that reason: it's efffect on public opinion.
That one image of one young man being carried away in a powerful jet of water did more for civil rights than a thousand peaceful, disciplined open carry protestors could today. The image of sixty pound German Shepard lunging at the end of a leash, and finally tearing loose to maul a protester that outweighed the dog by barely forty pounds created a sense of horror among everyone who saw the news that night, whether they were black or white, rich or poor, that we simply can't hope to match. Those images galvanized a nation, and forced it to listen to it's concience, and that type of image probably isn't available to us outside of pure, blind luck. It could happen, but engaging an opponent as powerful as the anti gun movement is and using luck as a strategy is, at best, a fool's course.
Our modern police agencies simply won't accomodate us. Modern police agencies are far more likely to have a beautiful sergeant, who is college educated, soft spoken, self assured and well managed quietly answering a reporter's questions than they are to overreact, and generate the sense of outrage, of terror and finally of disgust that fueled the civil rights movement and drove it to it's accomplishments.
Police agencies still make mistakes, and at times, the scale can be blindingly large. Here in Seattle, the two recent, best examples of that are the WTO and Mardi Gras riots, but the massive overreaction, on a force wide, simultaneous basis, the kind that civil disobedience depends on to generate real change in a divided society is, for the most part, a thing of the past.
It is good, very good that this is so, but it does mean that if real change is to be had, another way must be found. Power, real power is required. More power than can be bought, more power than any one person can muster.
Courage isn't enough. Money isn't enough. Anger isn't enough. Conviction isn't enough. He stood in front of a tank, and refused to move. In that case, the entire world saw him, and bore witness to his stand. More people in more places in more languages gave their attention to that instant than we could ever hope to attract to an open-carry protest anywhere in the United States.
And now, in the end, he's dead, and China is still the same. Nothing changed. The greatest impact his death had was as my fodder, to make this small, cheap point on an insignificant gun board in another country.
The difference between a revolutionary and a common criminal is simple: victory.
To walk into a grocery store in Washington state displaying a weapon is to surrender.
