commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Michael Allen of Opposing Views has been following an interesting controversy at Kroger grocery stores which apparently began based on Kroger’s current policy which allows the open carry of firearms in its stores.
This policy triggered concern on the part of a gun control group called Moms Demand Action (MDA) which organized a petition drive that collected 300,000 signatures calling “for the grocery store chain to ban the open carry of guns because moms and children shop in the stores.”
Michael Allen of Opposing Views writes that “the gun safety group has asked its members to deliver copies of a petition with 300,000 names to Kroger grocery stores across the U.S.”
Moms Demand Action writes on its Facebook page:
Our members across the country are delivering nearly 300,000 petition signatures to Kroger stores asking them to prohibit open carry. This Ohio store manager – and some others – refused to accept our petitions and were discourteous, despite the fact that women and mothers make up the majority of their customers.
However, several managers took our petitions and told members that Kroger management is “taking our concerns into consideration.” Kroger needs to hear from you: their most important customer. Even if you’ve called Kroger before, please call again now, and LIKE and SHARE this status.
Michael Allen explains that in response to the MDA demands, “a pro-gun website BearingArms.com claimed that Moms Demand Action was “attempting to isolate and bully individual companies into accepting their prohibitionist gun control philosophy. Their goal is to accomplish through bullying what they cannot establish through legislation…”
Unsurprisingly, BearingArms.com didn’t mention any actual evidence of “bullying.” It did claim that MDA founder Shannon Watts lives in a “suburban mansion in ultra-white, ultra wealthy Zionsville, Ind.”
Although the pundits at BearingArms.com, not unexpectedly, managed to express their position in carefully crafted phrases suggesting a certain amount of education, such does not seem to be the case with certain other pro-gun supporters, who according to Liberaland.com, left the following inflammatory messages which do not precisely follow the rules of usage set forth in Strunk and White in their grammar classic, The Elements of Style:
I bet you go home and f— trees and lick dogs don’t you. You pathetic excuses for human beings will never remove our rights.
I think the more guns the better. I shop at krogers and have at least 3 guns on me at any given time and two knives as well and people like me will always win.
God bless Croger [sic].
I support Kroger. Like shopping there with my firearm so all can see.
I’m in Kroger now rocking out with my glock out.
Ironically, on October 15th, about a week after Michael Allen’s original post about the MDA petition and the official responses of Bearing Arms.com, and the less formal responses of the “regular” pro-gun folk, a man wearing a skeleton mask robbed a Fifth Third Bank inside a Kroger grocery store in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Michael Allen wrote two days after the robbery:
The Kroger grocery store chain has refused to ban the open carry of guns, which one person took literally.
A suspect wearing a skeleton mask and carrying a semi-automatic handgun robbed a Fifth Third Bank inside a Kroger grocery store in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Wednesday.
The suspect also carried an umbrella when he walked up to the bank teller and demanded the money, noted Cincinnati.com.
The suspect put the money in a black nylon bag and left the Kroger.
* * * * *
This incident demonstrates that although violent crime in America is at an all-time low in most areas, armed robberies still occur from time-to-time and undoubtedly occur with some frequency in certain high crime areas. I’m not sure if there’s much data available that definitively informs us as to whether open carry has any effect, pro or con, on the violent crime rate and it would certainly be interesting to find out.
Clearly, in the above incident, if there were any open carry folks present, they were either unable to intercede or chose not to.
According to OpenCarry.org, California, where I reside, is not a traditional open carry state:
California is not a traditional open carry state. Open carry is generally prohibited except in unincorporated areas where the county has not made open carry illegal, or, pursuant to a CA open carry permit issued and valid only in a county with a population of less than 200,000 persons.
Thus, in my neck of the woods, the only people carrying openly are law enforcement personnel. I really need to travel to one of the open carry states and hang out for a while to get a sense of whether it is unsettling (or to what degree it is unsettling) to see regular folks wandering around with their guns exposed.
I suppose that like most things, many of us would get used to it after a while. On the other hand, I’m glad we don’t have open carry here in the Golden State in our heavily populated areas. Imagine going to Costco on a Sunday afternoon in football season after the 1:00 pm game and before the late afternoon game. You walk in and there are about 30,000 people (admittedly an exaggeration) packed into a single store. The average size of a Costco warehouse (according to the company profile) is 143,000 square feet. It’s all you can do to guide your shopping cart up and down the aisles without running people over.
Because it’s Southern California, people – for the most part – are incredibly polite and I don’t recall anyone ever getting pissed off because of a shopping cart collision. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. But suppose we were all carrying openly. 30,000 people; 30,00 handguns. We’d be stopping to compare weapons and keeping our weather eye open to make sure no one looks too threatening or is aiming a gun in our direction. The aisles would be clogged even worse than they already are. From time to time, guns would go off by accident. Occasional unlucky souls would get shot in the head. Pretty soon the police would be a regular presence at your neighborhood Costco. But don’t hold your breath. I don’t anticipate universal open carry being signed into California law anytime soon.