Category: Carrying / Self-Defense

It looks like poor hysterical Abby Spangler and her stuck CAPS LOCK key pulled the Brady Campaign into a fight they could not win with Starbucks. And so now, their campaign against the company, for their own sake, should be considered toast.

I subscribe to some food industry news sites, and yesterday I kept a close eye on anything related to the Starbucks shareholder meeting coming across those wires. Not a peep about guns. No one who cares about the bottom line cared about the fact that Starbucks wasn’t caving to the Brady Campaign. I didn’t even see a mention of it any industry news source or business article on the meeting.

If you want to know what investors are most excited about, it’s their instant coffee brand Via, the drastic expense cutting, and another brand of coffee they acquired in 2003, Seattle’s Best Coffee. In fact, the retailer is going to start growing again, this time being a little smarter about the process. Several analysts were quoted saying they expect very good outcomes for Starbucks based on all of the news coming out of this meeting. This year, their stock was upgraded to Buy from neutral. In other words, people just don’t care about their carry policies.

According to this article, we’ve hit six million people licensed to carry in the United States:

From its beginnings in the 1980s, the “right-to-carry” movement has succeeded in boosting the number of licensed concealed-gun carriers from fewer than 1 million to a record 6 million today, according to estimates from gun-rights groups that are supported by msnbc.com’s research.

I’ve been using 5 million, but I’ll switch to 6 now. Hat tip to Dave Hardy, who adds, “It’s far more balanced than you would have seen ten years ago.” This is true. As bad as the media environment is now, the media’s treatment of guns in the 90s is part of what radicalized me on this issue. They have gotten a bit better.

The Brady Campaign asks why Starbucks allows customers to carry guns, but doesn’t allow employees. That’s a good question. I think they should allow their employees to carry if they are legally entitled to do so! But I have no plan to make that part of this debate. A restaurant can rule its employees have to wear a uniform if they want to, even though it would be absurd to demand the same thing of customers. There’s a difference between customers and employees. But you can blame a lot of this on lawyers.

The primary reason that businesses have weapons policies is CYA. Businesses are far less liable for the actions of their customers than they are for the actions of employees when on the job acting as agents of the corporation. This doesn’t have much specifically to do with guns, it’s just a general fact. Your company has far more liability issues if you get into an accident driving a company car on company business than they would be if you hit someone on the way to work in your own vehicle. That doesn’t necessarily say anything about the danger of driving. It doesn’t have to make sense to get a jury award. Juries are sucker for a sympathetic client and a big, rich corporation. If that wasn’t the case, John Edwards never would have been rich enough to pay off a staffer to take the fall for a baby he sired with his mistress.

It comes down to this. If a pizza delivery guy pops an armed robber, we’d all completely agree that he was acting in self-defense, and that such an act would not be a misuse of firearms. But suppose the family of the armed robber decides to sue the pizza shop? What if the pizza shop allowed their employee to be armed? Doesn’t that make the shop more liable? For a mom and pop shop, they probably value the lives of their employee (often a relative) more than they worry about being sued. They have insurance for that anyway. But for a large chain pizza joint, they have entire HR departments that fret and worry about how the company may get sued. They get blamed for stuff like that, especially if an HR policy, or lack of one, becomes an issue in a lawsuit. Corporate HR departments are risk averse and very eager to avoid blame for anything. Blame in a lawsuit is far worse than dealing with a dead employee, who quite honestly, has more of a case against the armed robber than they do against the employer. Corporate HR would also like to inform your family of the wonderful death benefit they provide for employees.

The fact is that the life of an employee means far less to a big corporation than than the possibility of a giant lawsuit, especially one that results in finger pointing at corporate headquarters. They might make a public face about being concerned about violence in the workplace, but the real concern is liability. Everyone knows that someone intent on violence isn’t going to suddenly remember the corporate policy and change his mind. That’s the elephant in the room. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is having a workplace violence policy that forbids employees from having effective means of self-defense shields the corporation from liability for an employee acting in self-defense. Dead employees are an acceptable sacrifice on that altar. You can blame lawyers.

Tam has a pretty good post on the subject. I have both a 20″ and carbine length AR. I shoot the 20″ more often because that’s what I compete with when I shoot CMP/high-power. I’ve shot a few practical matches with my carbine, but I would consider it my go-to gun in a home defense situation if I kept it at the ready. It’s the keeping it at the ready part I’ve never been able to bother with.

Maybe I’m just not all that committed to home defense, but it’s always been easier or me to rely on a pistol for those purposes. I have to remember to lug a carbine back down to the safe if I’m leaving home for any period of time, then to get it back out again when I return. While, I have home-defense-appropriate fragmenting ammunition for the rifle, unless it’s a seriously messed up situation where I have time to go downstairs and unlock the safe, I’m probably going to be using my Glock.

I’ve always considered a rifle or shotgun to be a pain in the butt to deal with for home defense. What solutions do you guys use that would that would allow it to be used for home-defense, but avoid the scenario where someone breaks into the house and steals it, or worse, uses it against the returning homeowners?

The Alaska media reaction to the new National Park rule is predictable:

A new law went into effect on Monday that allows visitors to carry guns in national parks in the United States. But it won’t have much of an impact on Alaska because we’ve been able to pack heat in most of our national parks all along.

Actually, there were a few parks, like Denali, that prohibited firearms. But most allowed them. They humorously note, “If you can’t carry a gun into a national park in Alaska, where the heck can you carry a gun?”

They also note that discharge is still unlawful. No mention of whether a self-defense exception exists, but presumably you’d have that defense as a matter of common law.

Wyatt notes how the Philadelphia Police are responding to knife attacks against officers now. With hot lead. This makes me wonder what the policy was before? It’s extremely difficult to tangle with someone wielding a knife without getting yourself cut or stabbed. Wyatt mentions, “Take this as another example of ‘the militarization of the police’ if you will, but most of us want to go home to our families.”

When I think militarization of police, I think of things like this. Shooting people threatening others with knives should be standard procedure.

We notice more pant shitting hysterics from the media from yesterday in the Sacramento Bee, and from the Rock Hill, SC Herald, both of which think it’s trouble waiting to happen. Discovery News says it’ll make enforcement of poaching more difficult, and makes gun owners more likely to taunt a bison. Locally, the Chester County Daily Local News thinks guns in Valley Forge National Park is just an odd concept. Probably because they think hunting is what the Second Amendment is about, “People still aren’t allowed to hunt or fire their guns in the parks — so what is the purpose of allowing loaded guns into a national park?” then go on to describe why the Second Amendment is really just obsolete. The Kitsap Sun has roughly the same reaction. The South Florida Sun Sentinal speaks of how our founding fathers never would have approved of guns they couldn’t have envisioned in National Parks they couldn’t have envisioned, but then switches to saying guns in civilian hands just cause horrible carnage as gun toter after gun toter just kill each other in a confused frenzy.

All this even though none of this has happened anywhere else. It’ll happen in National Parks. Really. Just listen to the media.

Looks like this guy is in a bit of trouble. Apparently a McDonalds manager claims that he said :

According to police reports, the McDonald’s manager said that when she asked Dohmen to leave because of his gun, he tapped the holstered pistol and told her, “Bring it bitch.”

Dohmen denies that.

I think I’d be more inclined to believe his side of the story, because he seems to be more the pamphleteer type than something else. But his wrong was not immediately leaving when asked to. It appears he was overeager to convince this manager of her wrong:

Upon learning Dohmen was not a cop, Aldridge told him to leave because he couldn’t have a gun in the restaurant.

Dohmen says he replied that the law allows it, but that he also respects private property rights. He says he was preparing to get a brochure from his car to “further her understanding” when Aldridge told him she was calling 911. He waited for police in his car.

Once you’re asked to leave and don’t it’s trespassing. That’s not what he’s charged with, but he could be. I’m actually surprised the DA in this case hasn’t offered a plea to that.

In his report, Prosser Officer Antonio Martinez said he approached Dohmen’s car carrying his patrol rifle and ordered Gail Dohmen out of the car. When Officer Nickalas Letourneau arrived, Martinez took Dohmen’s pistol and ordered him out of the Audi. Letourneau then handcuffed Dohmen. Martinez wrote that Dohmen “was extremely verbal and was very upset I was taking the firearm from him.”

“I said, ‘You do not have my permission to do that,’ ” Dohmen said of the officer taking his legally carried, loaded gun.

Gail Dohmen, 63, said she was upset as she watched what was happening to her husband. She said she tried to grab Open Carry brochures from the car to give the officers but was told to move away or face arrest.

I would say making a move for the brochures is a move that could get you shot in a tense situation like that. How do they know you’re going for brochures? If the officer has his service rifle in hand, you’re best bet is compliance. You can sort out the right from wrongs when you get out of the immediate situation.

This is one of the big risks with open carry. I think this guy handled himself pretty poorly, given the circumstances. Most open carry people know better than this, but it’s the bozos who are going to end up in the news.