Kevin Drum on the latest Pizza Hut jackassery:

I guess this is the aspect of the gun rights crowd that perplexes me the most. It’s easy to understand their view of the Second Amendment (a view that I partly share), and it’s easy to understand, in general, their view that citizens should be free to own guns if they want to. But this Wild West mentality is much harder to fathom. Do they really think that, for example, pizza delivery guys should routinely wear sidearms and engage in gun battles with crooks, and that employers should (apparently) have no right to prevent it? Frankly, given the average age and disposition of pizza delivery guys, I’d just as soon not have a city full of sidearmed pizza deliverers, and Pizza Hut would probably just as soon not get sued when one of these guys ends up shooting someone who stiffed him on the bill or got into an argument over whether he ordered anchovies on his pie. What’s more, Pizza Hut is in the business of making money, and I imagine that most of their customers would prefer not to deal with a company that sends armed young men to their door. Being responsive to all these issues is just sensible corporate and public policy.

My employer can restrict my speech on the job, can fire me without due process, and is not required to cater to my every religious belief. Likewise, they can also have rules preventing employees from carrying arms at work — and most of them do. The occasional angry postal worker to the contrary, workplaces would almost certainly be more dangerous on average if there were lots of loaded guns around, and surely employers have every right to make that assessment. Right?

Phil at RNS:

Wow! Bringing up the “Wild West” card, the “unhinged gun owner” card, and the “Going Postal” card in just two paragraphs.

Plus, Bronze is boycotting Pizza Hut.

More below:

As Phil notes, the comments section is even more unhinged. My particular favorite, a reply to soimeone who said a pizza driver had been killed in his neighborhood recently:

It’s of course a shame when a pizza delivery guy is killed. Senseless death is always terrible. But would a holstered gun have saved him from someone answering the door by sticking a loaded piece in his face?

Well, that’s what happened to the guy in question here, isn’t it? It wasn’t “answering the door,” it was “sticking the gun in his face before he could even get to the door.” Yet the armed pizza guy was saved.

Then there’s this one:

It can seem like a happy ending when an armed pizza delivery guy successfully defends himself against a guy who tried to rob him.

Hmmm. It only seems like a happy endiing? My guess is that the pizza guy is pretty happy and doesn’t give a rat’s ass what this commenter thinks.

There are a lot of pizza delivery guys. How often do they really get robbed? What are the chances that one of the pizza delivery guys who actually carries a sidearms also happens to be the one who gets held up, and then is able to successfully defend himself with the gun, making for a happy-ending to the news story. Seems to me like an almost astronomical coincidence.

Well, it’s made the news a number of times in the past couple of months. So apparently not so astronomical after all.

Finally, robbers are mis-spending their lives when they’re robbing people, but not all robber’s lives are worthless. Pizza delivery guys aren’t in danger of being raped or something by robbers really- they’re in danger of having a few bucks taken from them.

Well, he apparently missed the comment about the pizza driver killed recently. He goes on to say that robbers should be rehabilitated, not shot.

Yeah, every once in a while, some robber is going to pull the trigger and kill somebody. But what kind of monsters do we become when we say that everybody who tries to steal $50 from someone forfeits his life? A life is worth a lot more than ten pizzas.

Great thinking, there. Since the killing only happens “every once in a while,” it’s okay.

Advice: If you try to steal from Murdoc, Murdoc consider your life basically forfeit. I may not have the opportunity to act on that, but watch out if I do.

My life is worth a lot more than ten robbers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 12:55 pm and is filed under CCW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.