The expansion of open carry in the Bluegrass State reflects a nationwide trend in recent years: allowing openly carried guns into many places where they were previously banned. Just a few days before the armed demonstration at Covington’s public library, a group of “gun hobbyists” met in a Terre Haute, Indiana, public library. One of them unintentionally fired his weapon, causing minor damage to a wall. Again, nobody was arrested, and no one so much as lost their book-borrowing privileges—open carry has been legal in most Indiana public buildings since 2011. Accidentally firing one’s weapon is treated as just that: an accident.

Announcing new executive actions on gun control in January, President Obama warned that unchecked gun rights could intrude on other rights, such as religious freedom and peaceful assembly. He invoked the mass shootings that had killed scores in churches and movie theaters. But newly broadened gun rights, particularly expansions of open carry, have begun to intrude pervasively on other rights as well—including the rights of private property owners—even when nobody gets shot. The effects can’t be quantified in death reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or in crime statistics from the FBI, but they are quietly touching the lives of thousands of Americans more directly than mass shootings ever will.

Consider this year’s expansion of open carry in Texas, where people with concealed-handgun licenses may now also carry pistols openly and in places they were previously banned, such as churches and some public buildings. Proponents repeatedly asserted that the new law would not increase crime and might even deter it. And Richard Briscoe, legislative director for the gun-rights group Open Carry Texas, testified to the Senate Committee on State Affairs, three weeks after the expansion took effect, that implementation was proceeding smoothly: “It’s been remarkably uneventful, just as expected. They are a very law-abiding group of people. The most recent statistics from the Department of Public Safety are that license holders statewide have an offense rate of 0.3 percent.”

In fact, the DPS data that Briscoe referenced reflect a low conviction rate for people with concealed-handgun licenses. The data also provides a demographic portrait of the typical licensee: white, male, and with a zip code in the suburbs. Saying that licensed handgun carriers are rarely convicted of felonies in Texas is just another way of saying that middle-class white men are rarely convicted of felonies in Texas. As illustrated in The New Republic and reiterated in Slate, prosecutors are reluctant to bring charges against a “good guy with a gun,” even in cases of deadly negligence. The privileges of licensed carry are particularly evident at the Texas State Capitol Building, where licensees are waved through their own separate entrance while everyone else waits in line to pass through a metal detector. The concealed-handgun license is also a valid voter ID in Texas—a college ID from a state institution is not. The concealed-handgun license only requires four hours of training, followed by an impossible-to-fail test—the perks might be worth the application fee, even for someone who never intends to carry a gun.