Yup, I visited a Starbucks on the 21st this month to show support, albeit small, for not bending to the Brady Campaign’s request to ban people legally openly carrying firearms into their stores.
What’s funny is that it wasn’t until tonight that I remembered a former regional manger for Starbucks got me into shooting as an adult. He worked down in the Maryland area hopping from store to store and came to Michigan to help a buddy of his run an IT company which is how we met. He took a bunch of us shooting one day and, well, you see what became of me from that experience.
He was a good guy. Still is, I’m sure. He had a story about happening to be in a Starbuck’s shop one day when a homeless guy was there buying coffee and some police officers who were also in line hassling the homeless guy. He laid into the cops pretty well, saying something along the lines of the homeless guy had money in hand to pay for his coffee and knowing damned good and well the cops expected free coffee. The cops backed off quickly, if I recall correctly.
He never did care much for police officers that over stepped their bounds. That became pretty clear after knowing him for not too long. Though you’d have a hard time painting him as anti-law enforcement. After the IT company fizzled out he got a law degree and went to work as a prosecutor at the county level in the area.
I remember waaaaaaaaay back in junior college Political Science reading about how police work in Holland was conducted in an entirely different and less adversarial way than in the United States (How true that was I don’t know, the professor would make Lenin look like an adherent of Ayn Rand, so his selection of texts has become suspect to me.
The textbook recounted a story of how the police there were expected to follow the law, and one officer was on some personal errand and was unable to find a parking place, so he parked illegally and wrote himself a ticket for parking, as that was what would happen to an ordinary citizen.
He still got a reprimand.
Far different from the cops here and in your story.
Check out the Doonesbury comic for Monday, March 22nd, 2010. It just caught up to your topic.
I sorta feel bad for Starbucks. I’m hoping the issue just fades away fast for them so the majority of the public never hears about it.