Starbucks politely asks people not to bring in their guns

If you haven't been to a Starbucks outside a major city center lately, you might be surprised to learn that openly carrying firearms into a Starbucks is "a thing" among certain right-wing NRA fans. In fact, wearing guns into Starbucks has become such a popular pastime that shirts extolling the virtue of "guns & coffee" are selling like hotcakes. So that even when you're not actively engaged in bringing your gun into Starbucks, you can still proclaim your love for doing so.

Starbucks, however, wishes you wouldn't. This week Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz politely asked people to stop it. However, Schultz notably will not enact any firearms restrictions on his stores. Instead, Starbucks will continue to follow local laws, and not abridge its customers' rights beyond that. But they are asking gun advocates to leave their weapons at home, particularly given the presence of small children in Starbucks stores, and the two recent cases where a gun in a customer's purse has been accidentally discharged inside the store.

In earlier eras and in other countries, people take to public spaces to make their protests. But in contemporary America, we don't have functioning town squares or plazas. What we do have is corporate owned and branded spaces like Starbucks, so that is where we go to protest things: to Starbucks.

But the "guns in Starbucks" meme is more than that. It's telling that this is happening at Starbucks and not, say, McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts. Gun owners are striking back against what they perceive to be their main opponents. By taking their guns into Starbucks they are taking the fight to the doorstep of their own personal straw man: the liberal latte-sipping Second Amendment-hating yuppie.

These protests also deliberately echo Martin Luther King Jr.'s sit-ins at Woolworth counters in the 60s. Except that in this case, gun owners ARE being served at the restaurant in question. And gun ownership is voluntary, whereas skin color is not. And also everything else about this which is wrong.

Image courtesy Flickr/Plutus