Shall Not Be Questioned

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: 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.”

“This is a loss for us. A fairly big loss that is almost completely self inflicted. There is no spin on this.”

“We had a major retailer that was aggressively neutral and the Bradys and the “I have a right to carry an AR-15 here!” people managed to collude, however inadvertently, to change that.”

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.

“The problem here is that many people in the pro-gun community confused corporate neutrality on Starbucks part for actual support of gun rights.”

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.

There are a lot of takeaways from Starbucks’ reversal of it’s policy to tolerate people following state law on guns. I want to make clear that while this post speaks about open carry, I am not advocating against open carry generally. Someone open carrying to  get coffee in Tombstone, Albuquerque, or any of the other local cultures where OC is accepted, isn’t part of this issue, because open carry is just what they do. I’m not even advocating against using open carry as a political tool in all circumstances. The problem is that people who open carry need to understand open carry is a tactic, and not a strategy. Open carry is not the core problem, the problem is how some people are utilizing it. So what are the takeaways from this latest development with Starbucks?

When You’ve Won, Stop Playing

Quit while you’re ahead. If you stay at the table to keep playing, you risk losing everything you’ve won. We had the antis beat on the Starbucks issue several years ago, but all it took was a little poke by the other side, and our side swarmed in and kept trying to make Starbucks own us. It started after the second Starbucks Appreciation Day,  when everyone posted pictures of their guns along with Starbucks brand, and only got worse from there. Much worse.

Activism Without Political Understanding is Dangerous

There are about 80 to 100 million gun owners in a country of 300 million. Gun owners are a minority, even if  close to 80% of the population supports some vague, ill defined idea about the people having a right to keep and bear arms. People who are politically involved in the issue, that is people willing to vote the gun issue, are a minority of that minority. The reason we win is because we can often swing elections at the margins, and there are a lot of Democratic gun owners who love their guns, hate their party’s position favoring gun control (just ask Angela Giron), and are willing to cross the aisle if they get pissed off enough. But it is dangerous to forget we are a special interest, and one that represents maybe 3-5% of voters in any given election. Everything we’ve built in the past several decades rests upon the acquiescence of that majority of citizens who don’t have a dog (or gun) in this fight. Anything you do to antagonize that majority is detrimental. Starbucks ultimately took this action because that majority are their customers, and they don’t want gun rights to be part of their branding. This is an entirely sensible and understandable decision on their part of a company who just makes coffee. They were happy to live and let live, but then we kept re-inserting them into it, and trying to make their brand ours.

Open Carry is a Tactic, Not a Strategy, Nor a Goal

The problem with failing to understand the difference is that when people become narrowly focused on a particular tactic, they will shoehorn it into a strategy to achieve a goal where other tactics would be smarter. Virginia used to ban concealed carry in restaurants, but not open carry. So a lot of people decided to start open carrying in restaurants to highlight the absurdity of the law. Virginia changed it’s law. In that case the tactic worked for achieving the goal. It fit in with the strategy. That was not the case for California, and that was obvious to anyone who understood the political climate there (which takes us back to the previous point on political understanding). There was no reality where open carry activism was going to accomplish anything other than convincing the California legislature to crack down on what little rights Californians had left in regards to carry. On the other side of the coin, Florida disallows open carry except for a single, narrow circumstance, so using open carry as a tactic to point out the absurdity of the law can support the overall strategy to achieve the goal of legalizing open carry in Florida.

The Open Carry Movement has to Discipline Itself if it Wants Respect

What is the goal of open carry activism? How are open carry activists going to achieve their goals? If there is a better way to achieve that goal other than open carry, will they embrace it? Will they embrace it even if it means not open carrying at certain times or in certain places? If the answer to that last question is no, what does it say about how serious you are about achieving your goals? If you think open carry is the hammer to the nail of every problem the gun rights movement faces, you need to go back and think about the section on political understanding.

Open Carry Organizing is not Normalizing

What normalizes open carry is doing it with as little fuss as you can get away with. If you have to organize it, it’s not normalizing anything. If the primary focus of what you’re doing is your gun, it’s likewise not normalizing anything. For example, if you have five friends who love open carrying, and you go to dinner because you’re friends, the primary focus is on your friendship. The guns are just secondary. If you plan to go to dinner with the same five friends because “Hey, no one’s ever done an OC dinner at Bob’s Slophouse,” that’s not normal, and you have to consider whether your tactic fits with your overall strategy in achieving your goals. By the same token, if your reaction to a negative law enforcement encounter is “I can’t wait to share this with all my friends on the Internet,” rather than “I can’t wait to share this with my attorney,” you might want to rethink what’s really motivating you. The Starbucks Open Carry events did nothing to normalize gun carry. By definition, it made it a big spectacle that people would not normally see. If you want to normalize something, you ease people into it in such a way they don’t really even notice it.

A decade ago, you would have crossed the street if you noticed someone yammering to themselves without a phone in their hand. I know I did a double take the first time I saw someone in an elevator talking on a bluetooth earpiece. Now it’s so common no one gives it a second thought. It’s just something that slowly crept into our cultural understanding without anyone making an organized push. That’s really how it has to work with anything. If you push something on people too hard and too fast, that almost subliminal understanding never has the opportunity to take hold and people may react with hostility to the new idea.

Whether folks want to accept it or not, when you’re advocating for political change, you have to care what other people think of you, and how other people perceive you. Embracing a tactic because you find it satisfying without really thinking through to the larger picture is a common but very dangerous pitfall when it comes to advocating for political or social change. The goal and the strategy need to take precedence over enjoying the tactics. The problem with many open carry activists is that they have a lot of fun with their tactic, hardly bother thinking about strategy, and prefer fun to accomplishing goals. I don’t really blame them. But often the smart and effective tactics in social and political change are tedious and un-fun. Ideally there’s a way to use a fun tactic and accomplish your goal, but if you can’t have both, you have to be willing to do the tedious work if you want to win. Ask the organizers of the Colorado recall if they are champing at the bit to do that again? Doubtful. They did something that was tedious because it had to be done, and they had effective tactics supporting their strategy of getting Giron and Morse out. Those folks have done more to protect gun rights than all the open carry organizing put together, and I guarantee you it wasn’t fun for them, it was necessary.

By now, most of you have seen Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s open letter. Before I go over where we went wrong, I want to point this out as a template for other companies looking to avoid inserting themselves into the gun debate to avoid like the plague. If Starbucks’ goal was to end the open carry demonstrations, without pissing off the rest of the gun community, this letter is full of fail. Let me explain.

That’s why I am writing today with a respectful request that customers no longer bring firearms into our stores or outdoor seating areas.

OK, but you see about 6 million to 8 million of us are licensed to carry firearms, and in at least one large state there’s no license requirement at all. Additionally, in several states, open carry has long been accepted and normal. When you say you don’t want firearms in your stores, you’re essentially saying you don’t want us in your stores, spending money. So don’t be surprised when a lot of people respect your wishes and take their business to your competitors. A simple change of one word in this sentence, changing “bring” to “display” would address the perceived concern in a way that doesn’t alienate people who just want to “carry” and not make a big stink about it. Presumably Starbucks doesn’t actually believe that people carrying concealed, or openly in places that’s accepted and normal, is a problem for them. The problem for them was the folks turning Starbucks into a gun show.

Recently, however, we’ve seen the “open carry” debate become increasingly uncivil and, in some cases, even threatening. Pro-gun activists have used our stores as a political stage for media events misleadingly called “Starbucks Appreciation Days” that disingenuously portray Starbucks as a champion of “open carry.”

OK, there’s a lot of “pro-gun activists” who think what the open carry activists are doing with Starbucks is supremely unhelpful, and have tried to discourage it. Some of those people even previously encouraged “Starbucks Appreciation Days,” where we called on people just to go and spend money, and tell corporate they appreciated their position. We don’t think there was anything “misleading” about it. We did not wish to drag Starbucks into the gun debate in a public way. By not separating the clownish behavior from those of us who advocated a more measured approach, you actually just insulted the very people who would have been able and willing to advocate against the kind of open carry activism you were concerned about.

To be clear: we do not want these events in our stores. Some anti-gun activists have also played a role in ratcheting up the rhetoric and friction, including soliciting and confronting our customers and partners.

I don’t blame Starbucks for not wanting these events in their stores. This has gone way beyond what we initially advocates. To be honest, if they had banned only open carry in their stores, I wouldn’t have blamed them, and would have said the open carry activist community brought this on themselves by pushing the company way beyond their comfort zone. But that’s not what Starbucks chose to do. Whether willfully or ignorantly, they’ve informed millions of American concealed carry licensees they’d prefer not to have our business. If that wasn’t their intention, they needed to take more care in their ultimate statement. This is a good lesson for companies who may end up in Starbucks’ position.

I will have more to say on the Starbucks situation in a bit. I am actually working up a fairly lengthy post about this in my head. Probably two posts, really, but I am in meetings all day today and won’t have time to really bang them out on the keyboard until later tonight.

There’s two thoughts I have about the whole situation. One is that I completely understand Starbucks’ desire to extricate themselves from the political debate, and to end the open carry appreciation days. The message Starbucks actually sent, whether intentionally or through ignorance, is that they don’t really want us in their stores. I plan to do an analysis of their press release to show where they went wrong.

The next thought is that this was a thoroughly self-inflicted wound. It did not come to this because of what the other side did; we did this to ourselves. There are important lessons in all this, and I think it’s time to start having that conversation now that everyone’s paying attention, and before the other side tries to play this same card with other establishments.

I was willing to go out of my way to throw Starbucks business they would not have ordinarily gotten because they were not giving in to the bullying by anti-gun extremists. Following state law on the matter of guns was fine by me. But Starbucks has decided they no longer want my business, and I will take it back to Dunkin Donuts gladly. Their coffee is better anyway.

I would ask everyone to let Starbucks Corporate know that they are taking their business to competitors. I completely understand that Starbucks wants out of this debate, and that’s fine, but if they think they can extricate themselves from the debate by appeasing a small minority of insufferable extremists, and telling the rest of the 6 million (and growing) people in the United States who are licensed to carry firearms they don’t want their business, I can still vote with my wallet.

Also, understand this: it won’t stop with Starbucks. The gun ban extremists will go company by company, bullying each of them into ensuring those who exercise their Second Amendment rights are relegated to the status of second class citizens. We have to be prepared to take our money elsewhere, and mean it. If Starbucks does not quickly reverse this policy, I’m done with them. I won’t spend another dime there. I encourage everyone else to do the same, and don’t be quiet about it. We have to make this epic.

So it looks like the shooter may have followed Joe Biden’s advice and got himself a shotgun, then proceeded to use the cop killer loophole to get a pistol and magazines. It’s not clear yet that is the case with the AR, but the narrative isn’t looking too good for our opponents.

You almost have to wonder if they feel pangs of disappointment when it’s discovered they didn’t get their guns from Ahmed the terrorist at a gun show in Virginia. So when can we have a discussion about mental illness? It looks like this was another case of the authorities dropping the ball when it comes to protecting society from unbalanced people like this. We have laws on the books that strip people criminal or mentally ill of their gun rights, but none of those laws do a damned bit a good if there’s no follow through.

UPDATE: So much for the AR-15:

FBI Washington field office just confirmed gunman was NOT armed with AR15. Spokesperson says 1 shotgun and 2 pistols recovered

— Pamela Brown (@PamelaBrownCNN) September 17, 2013