I'm writing this in a Salt Lake City Starbucks. According to the company's CEO, Howard Schultz, this is not a 'gun-free zone." He would just rather you not bring your guns inside the stores whether you have the legal right to or not.
This is, I suppose, the most recent example of a business owner dancing on the head of a pin when it comes to wide-ranging public opinions on a very controversial subject and making money. There are so many ways to fall these days, I honestly don't know how some of these guys do it.
I get no comfort from his altruistic request. Everyone around me seems so very pleasant and civil and isolated into his or her own world. This is a wonderful thing. 150 years ago, a group of people sitting within a building in the American West would be doing many of the same things happening around me now. Eating, drinking, reading, talking. Some or most would have one other thing on their minds that we don't think about much anymore except occasionally when reading the awful stories about Newtown or the Navy Yard: self-protection.
We have evolved and civilized to a point where a place like Starbucks seems like the safest place in the world. Because it generally is. A citizen of the West in the 1860's, on the other hand, would always be slightly occupied with these thoughts: where might the enemy come from? where is my weapon? is it ready to fire?
Not here, not today though in 2013. The enemy is a million to one odds away and we are very happy and comfortable in soft chairs with expensive coffee drinks. He is out there, though. Raging quietly somewhere about a perceived injustice or blasting away thousands of computer generated humans on a video screen for hours at a time, considering the real thing. The fact that one of these monsters doesn't walk through the front door right now is simply bitterly good luck.
My safety at this moment is not based on access to a concealed weapon, because I don't have one. My choice, completely. It is based on very long odds in a very free society and my location. Another mass shooting on another military base will probably lead to another law or two. But it won't help other citizens of this country who live in places where guns are fired and people die every single night.
