It's brief, so in full. Glenn Reynolds:
SCENES FROM A NEW AMERICA: So I dropped the girls off at a movie, and — since the Insta-wife was lunching with her mom — stopped at a Sonny’s Barbecue for lunch. A man — late 40s, big, with a wife and a daughter — came in with an empty holster on his belt. As he sat down at the booth next to mine, the manager came by and asked him if he’d left his gun in the car. Yes, said the man, who had a permit but thought he wasn’t allowed to carry in restaurants in Tennessee.. Well, they’ve changed the law, said the manager, and if you want to go get it that’s fine with us. It’s legal now, and I’m happy to have you carrying — if somebody tries to rob me, it’s two against one.Most of the time, it's the gut response that separates us; horror or comfort at the sight or thought of a family man sitting in a restaurant with a gun on his hip. The political rationalisation follows.
The man stepped outside and returned with a Springfield XD in the holster, chatted with the manager for a bit about guns, and then sat down and had lunch with his family.
I don't think the guy would be any more likely to start shooting if he had a gun than if he didn't. Unless there was a robbery. That's why I feel comfort. Whereas the robbers... they have guns anyway.
I hope the coffee was on the house.
Via Tim Blair - who has also picked up on some Amazon one star book and film reviews:
Moby Dick, Herman Melville: “Too nautical for me.”
5 comments:
"A man — late 40s, big, with a wife and a daughter": fine. Perhaps more worrying if he's a twenty year old squirt talking to a non-existent companion.
Would the man with an invisible friend get a carry permit?
Would that stop him getting a gun if he really wanted to?
What difference does it make except that, again, either people can protect themselves against him or they can't?
Would the man with an invisible friend get a carry permit?
Good question. I don't know how old you have to be to get a carry permit. If you get one at, say, 21 and your schizophrenia becomes evident at 22, do they have a means of taking the permit, or even the gun, away?
Anyway, I like the idea that not only the crims are armed. People here are so mimsy about firearms.
"If you get one at, say, 21 and your schizophrenia becomes evident at 22, do they have a means of taking the permit, or even the gun, away?"
We do over here, but it doesn't seem to work too well. AS the Hungerford and Dunblane cases showed. Plus the cop recently who shot his mother in law and then himself.
"People here are so mimsy about firearms."
Indeed. It's just a tool. The cliche that 'guns don't kill, people do' has more than a grain of truth...
The thing about carrying in the US is that evidence is now in because they have done it so long now. Licensed people carrying do not cause high noon shootouts over a place in the checkout queue, they shoot very rarely, and when they do they hit the bad guy and don't shoot bystanders - unlike police. The evidence is that there are almost no bad effects. Just don't tell the hyperventilating Brit or Aussie.
ChrisPer
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