I'm sure you can still get a gun rack for your truck window in the 2060s
Besides, you'll know you're in Oklahoma when every tenth car has had the turn signal on for more than 5 miles.

Well, I had a friend who wrote an NPC who was always in a bondage suit, so...

I'm rarely in areas with lots of people, but is spot "suspect" conceals on a pretty regualr basis. On an average trip to the mall, I'd say I spot a few people who tweak my "might be packing" gauge, but don't get close enough to know. I'd say every 20 trips to the grocery store, I walk past somebody who's defiantely packing.
Minneasotta started issueing "on request" conceal carry permits 6 or so years ago, so I doubt its as common as for Texas, but Minneasottans do like guns. A lot. A guy with a concealed cary permit shot a bouncer at a bar just down the street from me last month.
In Chicago, I used to see concealed ARMOR on a semi regular basis. At the grocery store. Off duty / undercover cops, I'm sure, if only because the people wearing it seemed out of place for the neighborhood.
But as a SR character, I'd have a better INT score than average, and complimentary dice in skills related to this sort of thing.

LOL- well, since I wear almost nothing else during the summer cause i bike all the time, I have to say yes. Its not that bad, it dries so fast nothing really grows in it. Anything with padding (crash armor, helmit liners, gloves) is another matter, so I think real armor would get nasty. Then again, who knows what sort of nano-deposited anti-bacterial quick-dry compounds they would have in the future? There's already a nano-scale silver particle coating for plastic cutting boards that would work greak on kevlar...

Please tell me it was a hot elf ninja chick.

Even if it's a lie.

You want a hot elf ninja chick with BO?

Yes please.

So I'm not the only one to have a player go to town with a broom.

Of course, I should have seen this one coming. One of my players has her character, Noh-face, hanging out at a local Shinto shrine during a lot of her downtime. The character is an initiated physad, specializing in polearms. Noh-face had just hit Grade 2 and picked up Centering. Half-joking, I said that since the local priests make her sweep the shrine grounds so often, she could take Sweeping 6 as a Centering skill. Everybody laughed and the decker's player nearly choked on his Coke when he saw the zeal with which the physad's player wrote it down on her character sheet. In short, a good time was had by all and the incident was forgotten about. Several real months, and around a year of game time passed.

Except by the physad's player. As a story element, Noh-face doesn't like to bring weapons onto shrine grounds. The PCs had just done a major run, and had heat bearing down on them. As the group got ready to split up and lay low, I called for a round of Perception checks. Even with the huge number of collective dice that hit the table, no one managed to notice that they were being tailed. The players all looked at their low rolls and started asking if anyone had any Karma Pool left. All of it had been spent during the run. Then, they took one last look at each other, said a couple of stereotypical movie lines (the kind that always preceed characters dying) and went there separate ways. I get everyone to tell me where thier characters are going and then the nastiness started.

The goons were meant to be a moderate challenge to the wounded group of PCs. I didn't want anyone to die, but I wanted to let them know that they were being hunted (since it was going to drive the next leg of the campaign). However, I also figured that the group would have stayed together. The PCs are wanted alive, and I figure that a break-out session could be good for the next game, so I wasn't worried. The goons take the sammy while he's hanging at his favorite bar (he never was very good at laying low after a run). The combat mage, having managed to avoid almost all of his drain and still having a few elemental services left decides to fight the group of them, and gets wounded something fierce. When they went to get the decker, we ended up with a pretty funny scene, which helped ease the mood out somewhat (this was said with the decker holed up inside of his bathroom):

"If you don't fight, we won't kill you." --Head Goon
"Do you have a lot of guns?" --Rigel
"Me personally, or all of us together?" --Head Goon
"Umm...you personally." --Rigel
"Nope, just one." --Head Goon
"Oh. Okay." --Rigel
"I am the mage who just geeked your mage, however." --Head Goon
"Ahhhh...snap. Gotcha. What about the rest of your friends." --Rigel
"Oh hell yeah. They're a goddamn walking armory." --Head Goon
"You get good benefits? Hows the pay?" --Rigel
"Oh yeah. 3 weeks paid vacation, medical, dental, 401K...wait! Why am I telling you this?" --Head Goon
"Does your employer need a new decker? I kinda broke his old ones. A few too many hits of the ol' hammer. Just don't shoot me." --Rigel

Then, we get to Noh-face. The goons show up and tell her that they are holding the rest of her team hostage and will kill them if she doesn't go peacefully. To the other players' dismay, Noh-face says that if the goons tell her where the other PCs are, she'll let them leave town safely. I politely remind the player that Noh-face makes a point of never being armed on shrine grounds and she gives me one of the biggest shit-eating grins I've ever seen. A few more taunts go back and forth, then initiative gets rolled. Noh-face goes first, but just barely. I ask her what Noh-face's first action will be and she responds "I'm going to center with my broom and kick the shit of these guys." On her first initiative pass alone, Noh-face took down the heavy street sammy and got all the dirt off the shrine's back porch.

I come to find out later that Noh-face's player had been waiting for me to try disarming her during a run so that she had an excuse to grab a broom out of a closet, since she first gained Centering. Heck, she had even put Karma into Broom, bringing it up to an 8 by the time this happened.

This troll was high int and willpower, so that helped. I think he used something similar to the rules for becoming a ghoul.

"It isn't paranoia if they're really out to get you."

You always carry a weapon on your person. If you're going somewhere that weapons aren't allowed, you either leave it with the doorman, or you pay one of your contacts a few hundred to accompany you, and stand around outside holding your gun.

Um, as someone who has to were spandex for 30-40 hours a week of training, I can tell you I'm not planning on wearing it around the house. When I'm flipping or holding strength positions on rings, it keeps everything where it should be. Walking around my apartment, it would just be fragging anoying.

Also, if someone is going after you in you're home, bomb, poison or sniper are the most probable methods, and body armor is unlikely to save you from that. The bomb maybe, if it's small. And most corps won't go for small.

Depends on where your "home" is, and what you mean by "come after you." When your Redmond back-up apartment has a gang of drunk orks kicking in the door looking for loot, maybe you'll be happy you sleep with a Predator in your lap, y'know?

I can see keeping some armor fairly close by, and a weapon handy, at more or less all times as being very reasonable for some Shadowrunners. I know people who live like that IRL (cops, mostly), and they aren't ultra-paranoid professional killers living in the inherently violent (random attacks are worth being afraid of, not just corp hitmen) SR future.

Er, except for the physically glowing energy field part, yes? The armor spell is slightly less obvious than running around with a foghorn screaming "I'ma mage! Geek me first!" but not by much.

Actually, the foghorn and screaming is less obvious. There's probably nutjobs doing that sort of thing on street corners all the time. If you've got the Armor spell, too, people know you're the mage.