Peter of Firearms and Freedom will still buy their coffee. I plan to respect their wishes and not bring my gun, myself, and more specifically my wallet into their stores. The OC events might have been the reason they pulled the trigger on a policy change, but what they requested of the community was far broader. I plan to honor their request, and I hope others do too.
This has been making the rounds. “Don’t blame Starbucks, and don’t blame liberals. Blame stupid gun owners. Look in the mirror, own it, give yourself a pep-talk, and go fix it.” I think the best outcome would be for open carry people to reign in the worst instincts of their fringe. Every movement has a fringe, but effective movements step up and try to manage it.
Tam:Â No dogs or Irish. “You will not have that support anymore; I will be patronizing my real Bohemian neighborhood coffee houses. Maybe their owners don’t like guns either, but they haven’t taken the time out of their busy day to tell me to keep my filthy gun (and, by extension, the nasty gun-owner to which it is attached) out of their establishment.” Yep. I don’t know what Dunkin Donuts thinks of guns and don’t care. They haven’t taken the time to tell me they don’t want my money.
“No, you’re not being persecuted, you just took things too far.”
“If I Wanted Waffles, I’d Have Gone To Waffle House.”
A lot of people are looking at the circulating memo, which outlines their plan to implement their new policy, which basically amounts to don’t ask, don’t tell. It doesn’t really matter that they don’t plan to enforce it, it’s still a PR win for the anti-gun groups and a loss for us.
Ace of Spades: “Gun rights activists started ‘Starbucks Appreciation Day‘, which encouraged people to open carry in stores where the law allowed. Frankly, I think this is where it started to go off the rails. Gun rights is an issue we’re winning pretty comfortably. The left seeks to paint gun rights supporters as “gun nuts” and nothing helps their case more than pulling stunts like this.”
Cam Edwards of NRA News: “I understand that when I enter your store, I’ll likely be coming in contact with lots of folks who make different lifestyle choices than I do. It’s cool with me. But if you truly want folks to be respectful of others as citizens and neighbors, you might start by not asking gun owners to go quietly back into the closet as long as they’re in your stores.”
UPDATE: Thanks, Idiots.
They have a right to ask I not enter their stores, that’s fine, it’s their right. I have a right to not patronize their business anymore. That’s what I’m doing.
Other people have already said this other ways, but something I think was lost sight of early on is that every action or opinion — especially neutrality — is not necessarily based in ideology. Everyone who doesn’t care about gun rights isn’t a flaming liberal. They just don’t care about something that we do.
This is probably ideology-neutral, but I see it coming from the right, because I mainly converse with people on the right: Question any of their premises, or fail to identify their heroes or boogeymen as your heroes or boogeymen, and with many people you will instantly be pegged as the enemy, accompanied by all the usual charges of being a “libtard” and similar silliness. For normal human beings, the normal action is to be driven into the other camp.
In some ways that is what happened with SB. Despite “appreciation days” and whatnot, they just weren’t in love with us, and people failed to see that.
They weren’t in love with the lunatics on either side (granted, the other side seems to be made up entirely of lunatics), and ours were the ones running around waving their dicks in Starbucks’ face. Nobody likes random dicks to the face, and Starbucks reacted in a way that should have been predictable.
Actually, it seems to me that their recent clarification of policy largely has been their policy all along, they just came out and said what they had implied previously.
“This is probably ideology-neutral, but I see it coming from the right, because I mainly converse with people on the right: Question any of their premises, or fail to identify their heroes or boogeymen as your heroes or boogeymen, and with many people you will instantly be pegged as the enemy, accompanied by all the usual charges of being a “libtard†and similar silliness.”
Indeed. It is hard to order one’s politics a la carte in today’s Value-Meal-centric America.
You can’t just say “Can I get the gun rights, hold the foreign adventures and the Wo(S)D, with a side of low taxes and gay marriage, please?” Well, you can, but they don’t have cool jerseys, so nobody cheers for them…
Who needs a jersey when you’ve got Wookie fur?
As far as I’m concerned, the state has no business having anything to do with marriage in the first place.
Personally I never cared for their over-priced coffee & have never even been in one of their stores, so this doesn’t bother me at all. Some guys from work stopped there on Sat, when it was their turn to buy for the group, so I have sampled their wares. Duncan Doughnuts gets my coffee shop business, by the way,
I’ve never been to a starbucks… The nearest one is a 40+ minute drive away.
I live so deep in fly over country that when a plane flies over head, people freak out thinking something is wrong.
If Starbucks doesn’t want Guns in their Stores, tell them to put up a “No Guns Allowed” sign and be done with it.
Sounds to me that they want to have their Cake and Eat it, too.
I have been taking this a different way, while some are blaming our side for pushing OC in the stores to far I do not see that as the cause of the change in policy. The anti’s have been hammering Starbucks hard for years and I have to think that Starbucks wondered what they did to deserve the hate. The antis put them in a no win situation and they will not be happy with this latest move. All Starbucks wants is to sell coffee and to have nothing to do with gun policy. Now they they ticked off gun owners they should have just told the mad mothers of anti civil right fame to go talk to your law makers but they are still stuck in the middle.
Greg – The antis have been pushing it for years and they were getting nowhere. It’s only when our side stepped in in such a blatant fashion that Starbucks made this move. If we’d stuck to sending letters of appreciation for their neutral stance instead of claiming Starbucks “respects the 2nd Amendment”, then the antis would still be looking like the troublemakers, and we’d still have the old Starbucks policy in place. We have to accept our community’s share of the blame for this one or else we’ll do it again when the antis switch to another retailer in the hopes of getting us to do the same stupid things all over again.
That’s the real danger now; That the antis will actually learn from our mistakes better than we seem to be doing.
Won’t be darkening their doorstep again…
I dunno dude, if gay guys (or whomever) were going to Starbucks on a regular, nationwide basis, and were having a good-ol’ gay guy grope-fest whilst being all ecstatic-y about it and frolicking all over the other customers who just want to have a $4 moment of aren’t-I-cool-too, I’m pretty sure Starbucks’d prob step up and issue a pull-your-siht-together-and-quit-being-a-dbag statement too. Eventually.
Seriously. That one guy with the AR? He looks as happy as a monkey fcuking a football. I’m on that guys side and I’d want him the fcuk outta my general vicinity.
I’m on Starbucks’ side on that one.
But would SB’s response be “Hey, stop coming here half naked and groping people” or would it be “Hey, all gays, we don’t mind you but please don’t come to our stores.”
Because they went the latter route with us.
Not the way I read it. To me it said stop bringing your guns into the store and acting like a friggin imbecile. You didn’t Mt Everest for god’s sake. You walked into a coffee shop with a gun, then started to take pictures of yourself holding your guns like it was a participation trophy for 1st grade soccer and you were super stoked like that was as good as life was gonna get for you. You look like retards and retards with guns scare people.
Look, I know the idea of the recent OC movement (as opposed to previous OC movements, which weren’t movements so much as adults acting like adults who happen to OC) is to desensitize people to the concept of OCing, thereby making it No-Big-Deal. But you do that by acting like adults and letting people who happen to notice, notice. And those who don’t, don’t. Not by running around screaming “LOOK AT ME! NOW LOOK AT MY GUN!!! LOOK AT IT!!! IT’S NO BIG DEAL EVENT THOUGH IM MAKING A REALLY, REALLY BIG DEAL OUT OF IT!!!!!”
I imagine most of you are employed. Lets say you are a manager of two employees. One comes in every day, does his job, does it right and goes home without a lot of fanfare. The other comes running into your office every half hour panting “oh man, I just swept the floor! The FLOOR! Oh man that was awesome. Here, I did it with this broom! This one right here! Man, I swept the hell outta that floor. Quick, take my picture!” Which one’d you think was more competent?
I’m in favor of guns. That’s no secret. I carry moist everywhere and that is, by choice. I put the rigor mortis in the “cold dead hands” meme. I do as well, support open carry. It’s not my problem if someone is disturbed by guns. Get counseling. get over your fear of inanimate objects. I don’t do it because i believe it’s tactically inferior, and I choose not to draw attention to myself.
That being said, Howard Schultz has rights as well.
I can absolutely see the point that he may not want his store to be the focal point of pro open carry gatherings, which, in truth, are political demonstrations. So what he is doing in essence is trying to keep politics out of his store. I would be all for that except….
Howard Schultz is also a damned lying hypocrite of the first order. He and his money to influence society and political campaigns all the time. He uses his money and influence to promote a left wing and morally bankrupt agenda.
So his idiotic move to ask the armed citizen to stay away, but without instituting a ban is just a typical HS weasel move.
And it bothered me to NO END that open carriers went to so much trouble to lick the shoes of a guy who is obviously as much a hard left anti American, anti American values fascist this side of Michael Bloomberg as you can get.
I don’t mind you asserting your right. Go right ahead. But making ANY private business who DID NOT invite you a focal point for your group political activity? What the hell are you thinking? I do believe any of you could have walked in on occasion, plainly armed, and Starbucks would not have said a word. But you self centered idiots can’t see the difference between tolerance and and an invitation. You just kept pushing, and made yourself a bad guest, and have been asked to leave the party.
I quit going to Starbucks long ago. Because my world of right and wrong extends beyond gun ownership. Welcome to my Starbucks-less world, gun owning suckers who will sell out the rest of your value system to drool over not so obvious (in fact non existent) support from someone you should NEVER have associated with in the first place. Wake the hell up, and get out of league with the devil. And all those like him.
And what the hell were you doing in there in the first place? You should be drinking boiled coffee out of a tin cup, not that hipster dreck anyways.
The main problem here, which it seems everyone is missing (other than HSR47) is that these “in your face, I’ve got rights” outriders are causing our purpose a lot of visible damage. Being an amateur conspiracy nut, let’s try this: these morons are actually hired by the other side to foment bad mojo for us. Gotta go, but I’ll be back in a bit…
This would not surprise me at all! Consider how many times “demonstrators” have been bussed in for the occasion.
The range I shoot at is in the back half of a gun shop. The gun shop has a very explicit policy that if you bring a gun through the door it must be in a holster, case or range bag, whether you’re bringing it to shoot in their range, trade in or have their gun plumber do some work on it. I don’t generally look for signs, but sort of assumed that most gun stores have similar policies.
It occurs to me that the folks at Starbucks with ARs in their hands, on slings, or propped against their tables are behaving in a manner that wouldn’t be acceptable in at least some gun shops. Is it really a surprise that non-gunnies are uncomfortable with behavior that professional gunnies would react negatively to?