Workplace Follies: Give Me a Tall Latte and a Box of 22 Caliber Winchester Silvertips

From today’s Murdoch Journal comes the troubling news that some of our fellow citizens are exercising their Constitutional rights to make public jackasses of themselves by openly wearing their firearms on their morning Starbucks run.  The loosely organized but growing “open carry” movement is challenging some of the country’s leading retailers to try and stop them.  For now anyway, businesses have the right to ban guns on their premises but some–like Starbucks–have decided not to for fear that their workers will be hassled or intimated by swarms of  angry strict constructionists.  Can you spell, Mafia, boys and girls?

Now, folks, I grew up in  the backwoods of West Virginia in a hunting culture where every household had multiple guns.  I do not recall a single instance of seeing an openly armed person–who was not a law enforcement officer–at a grocery store or in church or anyplace else where fellow citizens gathered. Having the “right” to bear arms and feeling compelled to do so are two entirely different matters that I thought we, as a nation, had resolved back in the Wyatt Earp days.  (There was a reason Tombstone was called Tombstone.)

Here’s a prediction.  Coming soon to a workplace near you is a legal challenge to the rights of employers to ban guns in working environments.  Think of how much fun that termination interview is going to be when the person across from you is packing.

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