The Brady Center To Prevent Gun Violence has a March 8 piece turning up the heat on Starbucks yet again, or still. Why gun control activists are targeting Starbucks. Remember, that was their headline. This one is especially malicious and bitter.
Targeting is correct. It is an initiative move, it is aggressive, to be sure, and it is hostile. It picks a fight, which has some thinking what any real agenda of such pressure tactics is.
The subtitle of the Brady commentary is The Brady Campaign is asking the chain to prioritize customer and employee safety, not take a position in America's gun debate.
What do you think Starbucks is choosing? The chain is choosing customer safety and is not taking a position. It's position is to be neutral, but this isn't good enough to suit the anti-gun crowd. Like all leftist organizations, it demands something the target is already doing best without them.
Paul Helmke for the Brady Center writes that gun owners have no training. This is misleading both Starbucks and readers, since many, many gun owners complete training far beyond what is required to obtain a concealed carry permit. Could it be that Starbucks consulted gun owners and found Brady to be misleading? It's good advice for anyone hounded by Brady.
It's the seriousness of the primary responsibility that impels gun owners to learn how to optimize their utility of the weapon. The responsibility is to self and loved ones because no one else will do it. Understanding and accepting this reality requires one to learn what he or she can to fulfill that purpose as safely as possible.
The American gun owner knows that anti-gun shouters will do nothing to protect the lives of citizens in the absence of Police in spite of the fact that beat officers endorse the armed citizen. It's common knowledge in the liberty culture. Anti-gun people do not live with the consequences of your taking their advice over the advice of liberty purists who remind us that we are on our own.
In talking about the ‘risks of gun ownership' within the Brady article, it's important to know that Helmke would know nothing of the subject. It's like a confirmed bachelor telling a father how to raise his kids.
Another clue that Brady doesn't get the issue is Helmke's what-if comparison of Starbuck's neutrality to institutional food poisoning, an especially underhanded tactic.
Meanwhile, the second amendment activists don't pressure Starbucks at all, unless it's with appreciation, buying their scones and pre-paid gift cards and even their coffee in supermarkets. Starbucks markets its coffee by the pound in supermarkets, and it's good and delicious. Larger packages are available, too, if you want them.
Ordinarily, I would let selected anti-gun articles go and let the readers digest the rage that goes off-topic and puts another business in the middle; It's a common tactic to harass businesses to go anti-gun. But this time I need to point something out: in pressuring any business to take up a position and say they shouldn't take up another position or even remain neutral is an all too familiar terrorist tactic. Since ancient times, terrorism has done a thing called third party pressure for political purposes. In hundreds of years, little has changed about this tactic.
Targeting in their article's headline is the right word. The Helmke article has the distinct tone now of punishing Starbucks. Ladies and Gentlement, this is the left in America. The gun owners appreciate the neutral position of Starbucks and in being guided by the law and due process. It seems that Starbucks already has something in common more with liberty purists than anti-gun activists who hound them.
Anti-gun activists know they can't move second amendment freedom purists because the anti-gun are simply on the wrong side of the issue to begin with. You won't find better evidence of a poor strength of their position than their choice of tactics: an obnoxious hounding a business instead of letting it go in freedom and moving on.
Hounding. Forcing a business to see it your way.
Gun owners visit Starbucks and smile when they remember that being neutral is perhaps one of the best choices Starbucks could make. It's smart, it's informed, and it's American. It is dignified, it is fair, and it is honest. It is also respected by liberty purists.
Gun owners will buy Starbucks today wearing a sidearm or not. The Brady Center acts out what is to come for all of America if we're not careful. They prove it every day they hound some enterprise when their position cannot stand on its own merits.
The reverend Billy Graham said that when one finds courage, the spines of others are stiffened. Is Starbucks safer if it remains neutral? Yes, it is. Being neutral on this issue could be a refusal, one that resists the aggression that is trying to tell them what to think and what to do, pure aggression for that third party hostility. Taking the position of wanting to be left alone could make the rest of the country safer from being hounded.
It could stiffen spines of others. Let's have a cup of coffee on that.
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How does the armed citizen defeat boondoggles of the nation to make our streets safer? See Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns now available as an e-book online.
Comments
I recall vividly entering a Starbucks in Tucson, AZ on my way back from a hunting trip to grab a quick coffee drink while still openly carrying a Glock 17 in a holster. Having been hunting, I really wasn't dressed in my best (cammie pants and an older t-shirt).
What truly surprised me at the time (this was a few years ago) was that none of the employees batted an eye. I got my drink, enjoyed it, and left. I had figured at the time that Starbucks would be fairly anti-gun, just due to their perceived clientele.
Open carriers are a little more common in Tucson than some places, but it is still always nice to be able to peaceably conduct your business with an openly carried firearm and have nothing happen. Nothing is good.
When I heard of this flap over the last week or so, I have begun to patronize Starbucks a lot more again, in support of what is truly a fair and neutral stance. Even though I'm now in TX and can not legally open carry, I'll still show my support with my w
The Brady bunch know they cannot intimidate like they once did and they are desperate to make Starbuck's bend to their will. We need to make it clear to Starbucks that if they maintain their position of being neutral and following the local laws as they indicated they would we should all show our support not by wearing guns necessarily but by writing letters to the company, e-mails, and calls thanking them for their stance and more importantly their refusal bend to political terrorism. If their was a pin that I could attach to my shirt saying thank you Starbuck's for not yielding to political terrorism by the Brady bunch I would have it on everytime I walked into a Starbucks.
Bottom line, the Brady crew are anti choice. They want to impose their values on everyone and use businesses like Starbucks to enforce them. What they conveniently ignore is that only the peaceful and law abiding obey such rules, so in effect what they are really asking for is an environment of armed criminals and helpless victims. Luckily, the public is fast becoming aware that these fearmongering scum are not now and never have been worthy of even passing notice. May they quickly fade into the obscurity they so richly deserve.
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