Oh good… Another big business is being pressured to boycott law abiding gun owners. However, unlike Starbucks, Jack in the Box, Chipotle, and Target, Kroger has decided to reject the Bloomberg-inspired requests to ban guns on their property. I guess they (for some strange reason) didn’t feel like experiencing an uptick in violent crime and robberies.
According to the Wall Street Journal (strangely I didn’t see this report on Bloomberg News), a Kroger spokesperson has said that the company will continue to allow carry – both concealed and open carry – as allowed by local laws. In other words: If you anti-gun hoplophobs want to keep me from carrying my 1911 when I’m shopping for football-season snacks, you’re going to have to take it up with my legislators… Because my local business has (wisely) decided that such public policy debates are not really corporate-America’s jurisdiction. I mean heck, they’re a grocery company. Their main goal in life is to make a couple bucks off of selling me lotto scratch tickets (I like burning dollar bills) and perishable goods for Sunday evening chili.
In recent months years, Bloomberg’s anti-gun groups have taken a decisively effective tactic of targeting (excuse the pun) and intimidating businesses into being the enforcers of gun restrictions that otherwise had no hope of passing local legislatures. Of course, this new trend tends to show the difference between the Left and the Right on issues of public policy. While gun-loving Americans might dislike the idea of their favorite retail chain banning guns, they tend to respect that such decisions are within the rights of private property owners… As a result, they simply stop eating cheap Mexican food (Chipotle), or buying overpriced fast food (Jack in the Box).
Leftists, on the other hand, seem to have a love affair with intimidating the masses into compliance with their utopian vision. And, really, this seems to go to the heart of what is at stake in the debate over more government. While a libertarian, or conservative, utopia might expose more people to the horror of a law abiding gun owner peacefully carrying his holstered weapon, a liberal utopia tends to restrict and suffocate the actions of a handful of law-abiding citizens.
After all, communists, leftists, and even anti-gun zealots can live pretty peaceably within a relatively free society. Anti-gun hoplophobes are free to patron the local businesses that have posted signs indicating a target rich environment (no-gun signs). Commies and socialists are more than free to donate above and beyond their required tax rate, or set up some sort of a hippie commune in Boulder, Colorado, with a handful of (possibly unbathed) like-minded children of the 60s. But in the ideal world of leftists, statists, and even anti-gun nannies such as Bloomberg, no such accommodations or allowance would be extended to gun-loving shoppers, or greedy capitalist pigs who dare to keep over half of the money they earn.
In truth, it’s a mere difference of vision… Of course, only one of these visions (cough*Bloomberg*cough) tends to restrict the enumerated rights of law-abiding citizens.
That being said, it’s probably not a bad idea to implore open carry activists to use a little bit of common sense. There’s really no reason to walk through a Kroger with your AR-15 at the “low ready” while shopping for frozen pizza. You want to carry open? Be sure you do it somewhere where you aren’t likely to convince Kroger that such activities need to be brought to a halt. I would never, in a million years, support a law that mandated businesses to allow firearms (it’s a private property issue, not a gun issue); so, really, it’s up to us to convince individual businesses (with our natural charm and uncanny ability to seduce individuals into the “freedom movement”) that deferring to local laws on firearm carry is in their best interest.
So far, Kroger seems to being doing right by its customers. They have yet to cave to Bloomy’s intimidation tactics. Kroger has done exactly what a non-partisan business should do: They told a bunch of activist liberals that if guns are that big of a problem, the appropriate action should be taken with the city council, state legislature, or federal lawmakers. Not their local purveyor of milk and produce.
Oh, and as a closing thought: I’ll stop carrying my guns to the grocery store, as soon as Bloomberg promises to start shopping without his armed security. It turns out, one 1911 is a whole lot more affordable than hiring a handful of retired NYPD cops as 24/7 bodyguards.
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