Business must be booming these days for a chain of Washington State ice cream shops, because Molly Moon’s had no problem banning uniformed police officers from bringing guns inside their shops. The owner of the chain, Molly Moon Neitzel, claims that armed police officers in her stores make some of her employees feel unsafe. So she’s decided to protect her employees’ feelings by banning cops carrying guns.
Someone might want to point out to Ms. Neitzel that criminals don’t respect laws, much less signs. And given the publicity the ban has gotten, bad guys now know the ice cream shops, along with employees and customers inside pose little risk of meaningful resistance.
In other words, Neitzel’s virtue signaling has served to ring the dinner bell for bad guys looking for people to easily victimize.
Sign posted at Molly Moon’s Ice Cream near @SeattlePD East Precinct and now defunct #CHOP zone. “Police Officers: Molly Moon’s is a gun free zone. Please do not come inside if you are wearing a firearm.” pic.twitter.com/6MCerPTkzY
— Brandi Kruse (@BrandiKruse) July 8, 2020
But that’s a small price to pay for providing employees a “safe space” in which to work. Neitzel’s shielding her “BIPoC” employees and their delicate snowflake feelings from the potential discomfort that would result from having police officers in their stores.
From WTTH:
[Neitzel] defended her signage in a post online to her customers.
“Community, first and foremost we want to say again that we 100% support Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as divesting funding from the police department,” a note on their Instagram account reads.
The note explains the new signage as a way to protect her employees from confronting police over their firearms: “We do not ever want to put our employees in a confrontational situation of having to ask police officers to leave, especially our BIPoC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] employees.”
What caused delicate Molly and the fragile flowers who work for her to head down this road? A customer recently gave the shop $500 to serve ice cream treats to nearby police officers who had finished shutting down and clearing out the CHOP/Antifastan “autonomous zone.”
Having all those good guy police officers and their sidearms in Neitzel’s store caused employees to feel uncomfortable and unsafe. The story didn’t mention why employees felt threatened by the mere presence of police officers. Did it have to do with arrest warrants, illegal drug possession or other criminal activity? Or are her employees simply fragile cop-hating snowflakes uncomfortable being in the presence of real men and women.
Either way, Molly Moon’s ice cream shop has successfully alienated a huge swath of normal Americans who will no longer be patronizing the business.