Firearms: Starbucks's Reasonable Request
They are asking people not to carry openly in their stores anymore. In fact, they are asking people not to bring in firearms at all, so that entails that they don't want people carrying concealed firearms either.
I respect this request in part because it seems so un-American. By which I mean: they're not trying to get a law in place, they're not making some kind of putatively enforceable rule...they're just saying "hey, we'd rather you not."
I'm not a CCW enthusiast... I've had my own application sitting around un-submitted for some time. I don't like carrying, and carrying brings with it more disadvantages than advantages IMO--at least in the fairly peaceful area where I live. I'll probably get a permit someday, just to have it...but I'm hardly passionate about the whole thing. At any rate: I think people should respect Starbucks' request, and I plan to do so.
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if this request had its origins in agitation by some whiny soccer moms/dads...but it's best not to dwell on such things. It's a reasonable request, even if it will please a lot of unreasonable people.
Anyway, that's my initial reaction.
I respect this request in part because it seems so un-American. By which I mean: they're not trying to get a law in place, they're not making some kind of putatively enforceable rule...they're just saying "hey, we'd rather you not."
I'm not a CCW enthusiast... I've had my own application sitting around un-submitted for some time. I don't like carrying, and carrying brings with it more disadvantages than advantages IMO--at least in the fairly peaceful area where I live. I'll probably get a permit someday, just to have it...but I'm hardly passionate about the whole thing. At any rate: I think people should respect Starbucks' request, and I plan to do so.
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if this request had its origins in agitation by some whiny soccer moms/dads...but it's best not to dwell on such things. It's a reasonable request, even if it will please a lot of unreasonable people.
Anyway, that's my initial reaction.
posted by Winston Smith at
1:58 PM
4 Comments:
Winston, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that a place that has mainly young adults and families with kids as their consumer base, as in my community, be gun-free.
"Unreasonable?"
Surely you're capable of articulating a more nuanced view on the subject.
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/witt_intro.html
In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the Germans had accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'." Wittgenstein was furious. Some five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:
Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends. (2)
Not sure I understand your point, DA...
That to characterize anyone who doesn't want to go to a Starbucks where people who aren't LEOs packing heat as 'unreasonable' in itself is an unreasonable use of that word.
Ah, got it.
Well, but that's the point. I don't think it's an unreasonable request. I just think that a lot of anti-firearm folks are idiots about this issue. Which is not to say that I think they all are, nor that it's unreasonable to want fewer guns around... I myself want fewer guns around. I just tend to disagree with many more anti-gun folks about what an optimal distribution of them would be.
But we can probably agree: the current distribution of firearms among people walking around on the street is f*cking insane.
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