salon | Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men
come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons,
making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would
you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you
owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions
that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open
carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole
purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes
them feel good, apparently.
For
instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it
legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and
waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing
you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they
found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to
do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however.
Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is
dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park. Freedom
for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel
endangered by him.
After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in Newtown where
a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political
point. There were no incidents. Why would there be? When an armed
citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless
to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But
it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as
the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the
practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in
the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to
leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private
property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that
they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon.
