Yesterday’s announcement that Seattle-based Starbucks’ fourth-quarter 2010 earnings were up again – as reported in this morning’s Seattle Times – is evidently driving gun prohibitionists nuts.
Why else would Chicago-based anti-gunner Elliot N. Fineman make the absolutely crazy public demand that Starbucks donate $10 million annually to the gun prohibition lobby and change its policy of catering to legally-armed private citizens? Fineman, like the Brady Campaign and Washington CeaseFire before him, is promoting a boycott of Starbucks until the coffee giant hands over the money.
This sounds an awful lot like blackmail. Some might suggest it borders on racketeering.
Fineman is president and chief executive officer of the National Gun Victims Action Council. According to a story in the Youngstown News, Fineman’s 44-year-old son was fatally shot in 2006 by a paranoid schizophrenic in San Diego who had legally purchased his firearm. We have the utmost sympathy for anyone who loses a child, now matter how old, but California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the nation, and for a nut to legally get a firearm down there must have required a monumental breakdown in the enforcement of existing laws, not the passage of a new law.
Starbucks reported Wednesday that it earned $346.6 million, or 45 cents per share, for the quarter that ended Jan. 2. That's up from $241.5 million, or 32 cents per share, a year earlier. Its revenue rose nearly 8 percent to $3 billion.-Seattle Times
Readers will recall this earlier column, headlined “Starbucks Redux” last Nov. 5 in which Starbucks profits for the third quarter were revealed as a means of demonstrating the public rejection of the earlier Brady/CeaseFire effort.
Starbucks does not deserve to be used as a political football. They are a business, and from what the numbers show, a pretty successful one at that. According to the Seattle Times, customers flocked to its stores during the holiday season, apparently oblivious or indifferent to the possibility that other customers might be packing firearms.
This all started early last year – as this column reported here and here – when the Brady Bunch and CeaseFire launched a campaign to incite public hysteria over the fact that Starbucks refused to bar customers who open carry in its various coffee shops. The Brady Campaign had successfully browbeaten other coffee shops in California to ban open carry, but Starbucks stood its ground and courageously explained that it would follow state law, and (without actually stating this) not become a surrogate in the Brady Campaign’s effort to promote social bigotry against law-abiding firearms owners.
Instead of scaring customers away, it appears people have flocked to Starbucks. As the saying goes, “Money talks and B.S. walks.”
Starbucks, which allows people to openly carry firearms in its stores, must ban the practice and commit $10 million each year to getting sane gun laws passed, (Fineman) explained—Youngstown News
The Youngstown newspaper quoted Fineman lamenting that the National Rifle Association has a $250 million annual budget and 600 employees while the Brady Campaign has only a $7 million budget and 23 employees.
Bellevue’s Second Amendment Foundation has a budget of just over $4 million, and a smaller core office staff, yet they somehow managed to get the landmark McDonald case to the U.S. Supreme Court and win it, and they now have cases filed in New York, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Chicago and elsewhere. Their slogan: “Winning Firearms Freedom One Lawsuit at a Time.”
Here’s a bit more data for comparison: Washington CeaseFire claims to have 7,000 members statewide. The NRA has approximately 90,000 members here. SAF and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms have thousands of members and supporters here, whose memberships frequently cross over with NRA; that is, they belong to at least two if not all three organizations. The Renton-based Washington Arms Collectors has more than 14,000 members.
Based on this information, one might be compelled to ask the gun prohibition lobby if it is just possible that their agenda is simply less popular among the people than, say, the exercise of a fundamental individual civil right to keep and bear arms that is protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, Section 24 of the State Constitution.
We will put it more bluntly: Maybe more people spend their money at Starbucks because they don’t mind rubbing elbows with legally-armed citizens, and because they support this company’s gutsy position. Maybe more people started buying Starbucks coffee because they know they are welcome – along with their cash – in a Starbucks store.
More bluntly still: Maybe the NRA has a bigger budget because more Americans support its position on gun rights than support the Brady Campaign’s agenda of public disarmament. Maybe SAF wins lawsuits because it happens to be right.
Of course, speculation takes a second seat to facts and figures, so the bottom line to this argument is Starbucks’ bottom line. That has looked much better in a down economy ever since the anti-gun-rights lobby tried to intimidate the company with its campaign of political thuggery.
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Comments
Well Dave,
You hit the nail on the head again. And this Open Carry guy out the door on his way to Starbucks this morning. And as you know Jim Beal and I regularly meet at Starbucks in Federal Way with a dozen or so that open carry....never had a problem with Starbucks, customers or the FWPD.
From the article: " . . . is evidently driving gun prohibitionists nuts."
Not a long drive, I would submit.
Geez, Hofmann, you kill me sometimes.
Everybody: Meet Kurt, my GRE colleague from St. Louis. Read his stuff at the link above.
Dave, why would you ask the Prohibitionist lobby to answer direct, intellingent questions? At best they won't be able to, they'll get angry and deflect, and at worst you'll be accused of being an intellectually elitist bigot, insensitive to their need to impose their opinion on the vastly greater majority...
Go figure....Remember this king 5 news report last year and what I said at the end.http://www.king5.com/news/business/One-shot-or-two-Group-lobbies-to-ban-...
It seems the anti's bullying has them staring down the barrel of the economically loaded gunin having to resort to such desperate measures.As GoGo said we never have a problem at Starbucks even when we we to the one on Greenlake. :0).This spring will be a good time to get everyone out in continued support at the 2A rally in Olympia.We will be as last year serving Starbucks coffee.
Was that you in the Tunnel this afternoon going from IDS to Westlake? Yellow jacket and cammo drop holster?
Anonymous:
Was that who?
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