A reader-written opinion piece in the Santa Barbary Independent:
One cool moist morning at Montecito Starbucks, about a year ago, I’d ordered my usual “grande”-size coffee of the day (“in a venti cup, please”) and, turning with my cup to get milk, I suddenly noticed three fit-looking youngish men in neat clothes, each displaying a conspicuously large handgun on his right hip. They seemed like police or FBI or military, but their dark blue/black apparel had no insignias of any sort that I could detect, and I looked hard at these guys.
I asked to see the manager — whose name I never learned just as I don’t recall the exact date when this happened last year — and she was incredulous at my complaints.
“These are government guys who train near here, you should be glad they’re here,” she said (or words to that effect). “We’ve had robberies lately in this shopping center. You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” I said (as nearly as I can recall at this point in time). “I live in a civilian society, and having these fellows — likely good guys, so what? — practicing ‘open carry’ of their guns in Santa Barbara County is wrong. Ask them to leave, or to go lock up their weapons in their car. Are these weapons loaded? Do you really know who they are?”
Irate now, this manager said, “Hey—you know what? You go ask them to get out!” and turned back to her work.
Our country needs more gun control enforced by the government. My minor incident at Montecito Starbucks last year connects to a national gun rights debate which has recently popped up at various Starbucks around the country.
I’m assuming that by “my minor incident” the writer is referring to his scary run-in with the guys legally carrying, though I don’t see any “incident” at all. Other than maybe a customer getting out of line with the manager. “Ask them to leave, or to go lock up their weapons in their car.”? Really?
Also funny is this bit:
And these weren’t little .22 caliber pistols sported by the out-of-uniform Montecito Starbucks warriors, but much larger and more menacing handguns in the Glock or Sig Sauer range – they appeared huge and menacing on the hip.
I didn’t know that “Glock” and “Sig Sauer” were “ranges” of guns. I thought they were brands. As usual, gun-fearing opinionators don’t seem to know a whole lot about the thing they’re so afraid of.
He closes with:
And readers should find out where their favorite coffee houses stand on openly carried weapons. Otherwise, we risk returning to the Wild West with each man armed for himself, a libertarian’s heaven but a civilized citizen’s anarchy.
Ah, yes. The old Wild West argument. Funny that Dan had been going to this very Starbucks for years without any shootouts at the OK Corral but suddenly he sees a gun and it’s the end of civilization as we know it. Never mind that the civilization that he knows permits the carrying of guns into Starbucks.
More of the usual irrational projection.
This gem from the comments section, though, is priceless:
When people use their “rights” in a way that makes most others intimidated, they are stepping on the “rights” of those people.
Someone doesn’t quite get it.
