Anti-gunners trying new Starbucks boycott
by Dave Workman, Senior Editor
Nearly two years after the Brady Campaign failed in its attempt to force Starbucks Coffee into banning armed citizens from its popular coffee shops all over the country, a Chicago-based gun prohibition group is trying the same thing.
Kicking off its campaign on St. Valentine’s Day, the National Gun Victim’s Action Council (NGAC), which claims to have 14 million “gun victim” members in its network, wants the Seattle-based coffee giant to keep armed citizens out. That goes for both concealed and open carry.
According to Elliot Fineman, who heads NGAC, “Starbucks allowing guns to be carried in thousands of their stores significantly increases everyone’s risk of being a victim of gun violence.”
“Open and conceal and carry are among the reasons there are 12,000 gun homicides each year in the US,” Fineman asserted. “If we had England’s gun laws we would expect 375 gun homicides each year—97% less than we have. England’s gun laws are based on protecting public safety, ours on maximizing sales for the gun industry.”
Gun rights advocates were quick to counter that gun crime has risen sharply in the United Kingdom in the years since handguns were banned, and knife-related crime has soared.
Starbucks has consistently maintained a neutral position, stating only that it operates in accordance with the laws of the states where its coffee shops are located.
The brouhaha began more than two years ago when the Brady Campaign went on the warpath against restaurants and coffee shops in California, where patrons were gathering with holstered handguns, carried empty under the law in effect at the time. However, since then, the California legislature, bowing to pressure from anti-gunners, passed a ban on open carry of handguns in the state. Other companies serving the public did cave to the Brady Campaign demands, but not Starbucks.
During the year following the Brady Campaign’s short-lived effort, which failed miserably, Starbucks profits actually shot upwards. Despite lots of rhetoric—repeated by the current NGAC campaign—that these coffee shops would become somehow more dangerous with armed patrons, Starbucks has posted consistently higher profits every financial quarter.
Fineman, in a press release, declared that, “Starbucks has the legal right to ban guns” in its shops.
In reaction, Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, noted that Starbucks “also has the legal right to serve anyone it pleases.” That includes legally-armed citizens, who so far have behaved themselves.
There have been some violent crimes committed at or near a handful of Starbucks locations, but investigation of such incidents reveal that none of the instigators was legally carrying a firearm.
The new boycott campaign launched by NGAC was dismissed by Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms as an attempt by a gun prohibitionist group to use Starbucks as something of a surrogate in its “campaign of social bigotry against gunowners.”
