Mediamatters.org blogs a blog post at pagunblog.com. Our man Sebastian is calling off any remaining proactive Starbuckian gun rights advocacy. “I notice there’s still quite a lot of pictures of guns and coffee appearing on Starbucks’ Facebook page,” Sebastian writes. “I would like to note that Starbucks never asked for their brand to be associated with gun rights; all they want to do is sell coffee. Now that two days have passed since the end of the appreciation day, I’d like to ask everyone to support Starbucks by continuing to buy their coffee, and yummy baked goods. That is what I intend to do. For the purposes of really playing up the Buycott, I think we’ve gotten our message through. It’s time to let them go about hawking their product . . .
By all means, let’s keep the gratitude pouring into corporate, and pouring into their coffers, but I think we ought to let Starbucks’ brand go back to just being about great coffee. That means not engaging in, what in a person-to-person analogy would be walking up to the barista, and continuing to stick pro-gun stickers all over her, and handing her guns. She didn’t ask for that. She just wants to serve you coffee.
Handing her guns? Was that exaggeration for effect or did a gun rights advocate really hand a barrista a firearm? I suspect the former. But it flags the main issue that’s come to the fore: did Starbucks Appreciation Day participants remove remove their guns in store for photographic / political purposes?
None of the pics I could find on Starbucks Facebook page or the ones on mediamatters.org are definitive. But all of them risk arming our enemies (metaphorically speaking). Check this from imbecile (screen nic):
These people are flaunting it for the of flaunting it. The kind of person who is a “show-off” with their weapon is much more likely to use it when it isn’t warranted.
These kinds of people are the reason that I understand the need for the 2nd Amendment, but am not a big supporter of everyday citizens being able to own a weapon.
I don’t think “understand” means what he thinks it means. Anyway, here’s the usual gutter sniping from Boswell:
well, flaunting it to make up what the have so little of that they can’t compete in penis-waving contests even with newborns…
Yes, well, it’s certainly true that anyone who puts a firearm on a table at Starbucks to photograph is not using their big head. Not only does the coffee house firearms snaptography hurt the gun rights cause, exposing fence-straddlers to unnecessary (not say potentially dangerous) gun handling in an inappropriate environment.
But were these photos taken inside or outside a Starbucks? I’m going to assume not—and give the Facebook posters the IGOTD nod anyway. The Facebook pics cloud the issue of gun rights, “pollute” the Starbucks brand raise the possibility that the Seattle coffeesmiths’ suits may come to see pro-gun customers as a liability.
I’m all about freedom of speech and firearms normalization and art for art’s sake. But I think Sebastian’s got this one right. Gun rights activists should not only be responsible; they need to appear to be responsible.
The vast majority of these photos were not taken at Starbucks. They were taken after leaving the store.
“How could you arrange the guns in the photo above without lasering someone?”
Really? You obviously didn’t look at the picture. Hell, at least 75% of the area around the table is free from being in the line of (nonexistent) fire.
Fair comment. I don’t know what’s got into me this morning. Text amended.
Couldn’t anyone have taken a photo and posted it on SB’s Facebook page of an elegant single-action western gun? Maybe one with brushed stainless steel and rosewood grips? That would be classic.
I saw one from Napa, CA. Not stainless, but a SAA or clone, next to a cup of Starbucks coffee, taken on a back porch.
I think the idea of “lasering” is being taken too far.
Grasping and pointing qualifies as wildly irresponsible.
Placing them on a table and calling it lasering plays into the anti-gun notion that the machines are solely responsible for going off by themselves and are about to at any moment.
And yeah, I don’t see a Starbucks counter or logo on the table so this might just as well be a photo from someone’s house.
This – guns don’t fire on their own.
For all anybody knows, the photographer went to starbucks and bought a coffee then returned home, took their firearms and put them on their own table with their starbucks coffee and snapped a shot.
“well, flaunting it to make up what the have so little of that they can’t compete in penis-waving contests even with newborns…”
And the never-failing reference to male genitalia. These people are not only stupid, they are sick.
Hosana! I no longer have to drink Starbuck’s swill.
This is something I’ve been particularly mindful of. My understanding of this event was that it was born of the need to help ‘normalize’ relations between gun owners and regular folks in a step toward de-stigmatizing possession of firearms. It’s one thing to exercise our rights, it’s something else entirely to rub it in everyone’s face just because we can. We may be making headway on the rights issue but we still have to be mindful of our behavior and make sure we don’t wear out our welcome in the places that have chosen to accept us.
BossRooster,
This was not to ‘normalize’ relations, it was a direct confrontation intended to uncover a Big Lie propagated by antis that they have more numbers than gun owners (they claim 50-1 in their favor) and that they can force changes in the marketplace.
If they could force changes in the marketplace, they could force changes do the same at the ballot box. They cannot, and yet they persist in trying to lie their way into relevance. When they choose the battlefield and make it public, we are certainly allowed to go contend with them on their own terms, in this case, economic.
A lot of folks chose to hack the Starbucks Love photo stream and get their pictures on the SBUX website. I put the picture of my White Chocolate Mocha latte (and Glock 26) on the FB page started by the guy who initiated the call (on FB, anyway) for a buycott. After some consideration, I didn’t believe that Starbucks wanted their corporate communications confused with our agenda. They are not part of ‘our agenda’, their agenda is selling overpriced coffee. The FB page promoting the buycott, on the other hand, was a place for people to realize that they were far from alone in their beliefs.
The antis are going to get in a tizzy about anything firearm-related in the public sphere. I’m not going to bow to their sensitivities in every case, particularly when their intention is as much to convince firearms owners that they are alone and their position untenable as it is to extract greenmail from Starbucks.
Lighten up, Farago. A loaded gun is not a dangerous object if handled responsibly. Putting it on a table in a coffee house is not inherently dangerous. Unless your gun sucks, of course. Someone being swept by the muzzle of a gun when it has 0 chance of being fired is not dangerous. Now, I wouldn’t want *you* to do it to me because you don’t seem comfortable with that kind of responsibility.
I just bought coffee and left. Am I doing it wrong?
“all they want to do is sell coffee”
And t-shirts, hats, Coffee Presses, Coffee Makers, Espresso Machines, Grinders
Teapots & Teakettles, Equipment Gift Sets, Cups & Mugs, Tumblers & Travel, Mugs, Cold Beverage, Accessories, Winter Drinkware, Coffee & Tea Tours,
Syrups & Sauces, Hot Cocoa & Treats, Music & Books, Apparel, giftcards, subscriptions and a ton of other stuff. But that’s all they want.
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