We discussed here in February, 2010 how the Starbucks chain, when gun haters demanded that firearms be banned from their coffee shop premises, stood up and said no, they would follow the laws of the given state, and those legally carrying guns would be welcome. My friend and colleague Dave Workman brings you up to date here: http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-seattle/nw-gun-rights-activists-coffee-up-as-starbucks-posts-profits . Be sure to read his links for background.
It seems than an anti-gun group has called for a boycott of Starbucks on this coming Valentine’s Day, February 14. As Dave explains, many of us in the gun movement will be buying something at Starbucks on that day, just to make sure that Starbucks has a profitable holiday despite being boycotted by the antis.
No one put it better than Mike Crenshaw at the respected firearms forum found at www.thehighroad.org. A moderator who posts there as “hso,” Mike sent the following message to Starbucks headquarters: “I’ve just heard that there’s a planned boycott on Feb. 14 by anti-Second Amendment groups attempting to punish Starbucks for their decision to follow state and local law instead of changing company policy on law abiding customers carrying firearms legally. While I’m an occasional customer I’ll make a point of doing my share to offset any business Starbucks may lose due to this proposed boycott. I’ll see to it that my family and I are in Starbucks at least once on Feb. 14.Thank you for not caving in to the radical beliefs of a small vocal group of marginalized extremists.” The discussion thread can be found at http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=639239 .
Crenshaw, Workman, and the rest. This Valentine’s Day, I’m gonna drive my sweetie the twenty-some miles to the nearest Starbucks and scarf up a Yuppie coffee, or a hot chocolate, or a boutique muffin, or whatever. It’s about showing solidarity with an entity that stood up against an attack on our freedoms. And sending a positive thank-you email to Starbucks – thanks for that idea, Mr. Crenshaw! – makes huge sense.
On January 8, the Brady Bunch suggested a lighting of a candle as a protest to gun violence.
Awww…how sweet.
The 8th, of course, was the one year anniversary of the grotesque mass murder in Tucson, Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner. His most famous victim, left brain-damaged for life, was Arizona Congressman Gabby Giffords. She was clearly his intended target.
The gun-banners made much of the fact that Representative Giffords was shot with a Glock 19 9mm pistol. They neglected to mention that Gabby Giffords had, prior to the shooting, proudly stated that she owned and had a license to carry a Glock 19 of her own. The mass-murderer was put to the ground and captured by courageous citizens, including ARMED citizen Joe Zamudio, who was carrying a pistol of his own at the time, a Ruger P95 9mm.
But lighting a candle will prevent the Jared Loughners of the world from carrying out their monstrous deeds? Good Lord…it’s like the candlelight vigils from the Take Back the Night Movement.
It’s nice to know that people care. Hell, I care. I’ve spent an adult lifetime learning how to ward off monsters such as Loughner, and sharing that knowledge with others.
Some pro-gun bloggers got together and did their own January 8 counterpoint to the Brady thing. I wish I had contributed more to that: all I did was take a picture of some strong women with candles and nine millimeters at a Glock match in Clearwater, Florida on the 8th. (Great match, by the way, and kudos to the Wyoming Antelope Club in Clearwater for putting it on.)
The decades have taught me that women won’t take back the night by marching with candles. They’ll take it back when those who prey on them learn – some the hard and final way – that their intended victims can be more dangerous to them, than they are to their intended victims.
Those you see below have it right.
If some monster tries to rape or murder a woman I care about, I don’t want him to see the flickering light of a candle.
I want him to see a muzzle flash, from the front.
I hate to paraphrase Al Capone, but a candle and a Glock will earn women more safety than just a candle. From left: Gail, Kitty, and Lisa Marie of the Alabama Holster Company’s all-girl pistol team, January 8, at Glock match in Clearwater, FL.
Two recent high profile shootings show us that sometimes, in the aftermath, things go as they should, though in only one of those actual shootings did we have what anyone could call a happy ending.
Both occurred over the holidays. In Washington state, an Iraq war vet diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome that would normally engender our sympathy, snapped and shot four people. He fled to the boondocks, where he encountered a park ranger, a 32 year old mother of two. He shot her to death. The cop-killer was later found dead; it is unclear at this time whether he swallowed poison or froze to death out in the elements, or drowned. (According to one report, he was found face down in a creek. I haven’t seen the autopsy or toxicology screen yet.)
In Oklahoma, a man had been stalking an 18-year old mother of a baby boy. Her husband had died of cancer on Christmas day, and some of the German Shepherds she and he raised had mysteriously died – perhaps poisoned by the stalker, some theorize now. As if she had not suffered enough, the stalker and a hulking friend showed up at her door New Year’s Eve and tried to kick their way in. The young woman armed herself, pushed a sofa against the door, put a bottle in her infant son’s mouth and called 9-1-1. The calm dispatcher advised her to do what she had to do if he made it through the door before the cops arrived.
He did, and she did. She fired a single shotgun blast as the intruder burst through the door with a foot-long hunting knife, plopping him dead on the barricading sofa. His accomplice fled, but was soon in custody. I’m told the local prosecutor has already ruled it a justifiable homicide…and the first to establish a support fund for the young mother was the local PD, the Blanchard, Oklahoma Police Department. Info is here: http://blog.newsok.com/breakingnews/2012/01/04/fund-set-up-for-blanchard-woman-who-shot-killed-intruder/. Thanks to the retired NYPD officer and gunfight survivor who frequents this blog and sends it along.
Learning points?
n In each case, the death weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. Some in the anti-gun camp have already blamed the law that allows ordinary, law-abiding citizens to be armed in parks like the one where the ranger was killed, for the depredations of a madman who had already violated every law from the Sixth Commandment on down before he reached the park. I try not to use words like “idiocy” when speaking of the other side, but in this case it fits. The firearm is a tool, which carries out the will of the owner. Evil in the first case, good in the second. Yes, it IS that simple.
n The law-abiding armed citizen and the police are natural allies. We see that clearly here, when a gun owners’ civil rights group is the first to step up with a fund for the family of the murdered park ranger…and when the local police are the first to step up to help an embattled young mom who had to kill in self-defense.
I’ll be sending out two donations tomorrow. I hope all who can, will join me. A lawyer friend of mine, whose specialty is appeals for citizens wrongly convicted after self-defense shootings, suggests that flowers for the Oklahoma dispatcher and prosecutor might also be in order…
It’s a story that has played out before: someone thinks if their marriage license and their driver’s license are recognized by the State of New York, their license to carry a gun must be, too. A female medical student at the 9/11 memorial discovered otherwise, here:
The plot thickened. Searching her purse after she tried to do the right thing and declare her little Kel-Tec P32, police found a glassine bag filled with white powder and, not surprisingly, sent it for analysis. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made anti-gun campaigns his cause célèbre, publicly accused her of being in illegal possession of cocaine, here:
The medical student explained that the substance was powdered aspirin. Noo Yawkers don’t know what Southern folks know: powdered aspirin, notably Goody’s and BC Powders, are popular headache remedies south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the defendant and her pistol permit both hail from Tennessee.
For a hundred years, New York’s Sullivan Act has inflicted draconian felony punishment on those who carry or even merely possess handguns, even if they are licensed elsewhere. New York City won’t even recognize a permit issued in Albany or Buffalo. Google Plaxico Burress: even the rich and famous are not immune.
It is common for people innocently and honestly checking firearms at airports in New York to be arrested for felony illegal possession. A victimless crime, classic malum prohibitum, this has a ruinous effect on the lives of dozens of good American citizens every year, not to mention the waste in New Yorkers’ tax dollars. The Tennessee medical student has drawn much sympathy from the general public, and even anti-gun politicians are urging authorities to go easy on the lady, for fear of creating a backlash in favor of House Resolution 822, which would require national reciprocity in recognition of other states’ handgun permits, as noted here: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hold_your_fire_4dW6vKJHy3GFawLPw5riDM.
And of course, some of my large-bore and Magnum-loving friends would say that since she only had a .32, it ought to at the very least be reduced to a misdemeanor.
My hope for the New Year is that HR 822 passes the Senate and becomes national law…that the med student gets a finding from the crime lab of “Yep, it’s powdered aspirin” and gets enough from her libel suit against Mayor Bloomberg and the City of New York to pay her legal fees and compensate her for her suffering… and that some common sense gets restored to the gun law situation in the United States.
I wish you all a happy, healthy, productive and safe New Year.
All of us shooters give lip service to proselytizing: “Take a new shooter to the range!” “Take someone hunting for the first time!” Few actually DO it, however, at least very often.
Once again, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia inspires us. Just caught this from Eugene Volokh: http://volokh.com/2011/10/23/another-hunter-on-the-high-court/
Kudos to Justice Scalia for taking the time to do this. And kudos to Justice Kagan for being open-minded.
Scalia has obviously been a voice of reason for our side. Kagan has not. Will her new perspective be reflected in her next analysis of these issues on the highest Bench in the land? We won’t know until then.
Scalia has still set an example all of us would do well to follow.
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