Eat First Then Shoot the Other Patrons At Your Convenience

At American Thinker Chuck Roger talks about the willingness of Arizona restaurant owners to place their patrons in harm's way:

"Honest adults with licensed guns, go away. Lawbreakers looking for sitting ducks, step right in." Actually, the sign at the entrance to the Phoenix, Arizona restaurant simply read, "No Firearms." I returned to my car and left.

A wave of constipated thinking has afflicted some Arizonans after legislators passed a law allowing licensed concealed handguns to be carried into businesses that serve alcohol as long as the licensees consume none. Proprietors have the option to post the "No Firearms" sign, and many have done so....

The benefits of having decent citizens carry concealed guns outweigh the one-in-ten-million chance that one of those citizens will turn not-so-decent and shoot you. Law-abiding Americans brandish handguns in 2.5 million defensive incidents a year -- once every 12½ seconds. In most cases, a gun's mere appearance settles a brewing conflict. The National Center for Policy Analysis found that major crime plunges when law-abiding citizens carry concealed handguns [ii]. The same NCPA study, covering every American county, found that murders dropped by 8.5 percent, while rapes and serious assaults fell up to 7 percent in states with licensed concealed carry. Furthermore, if states without licensed concealed carry would institute it, then 1570 murders, 4180 rapes, and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would not happen each year.

The National Academy of Sciences reviewed hundreds of studies and found not "a single gun regulation that reduced violent crime or murder." A criminal told John Stossel, then with ABC, that he wasn't "worried about the government saying [he] can't carry a gun" because he's "gonna carry a gun anyway." A Washington, D.C.-area assault victim asked, "If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body." If we replace "house" with "restaurant" in that last quote, we may ask if some restauranteurs see themselves as noble for creating gun-free zones from which defenseless patrons can depart for the beyond.

Can just anyone be licensed to carry a gun? Arizona has strict requirements for obtaining a concealed carry permit. Applicants must be twenty-one or older, state residents or American citizens, and not under felony indictment or conviction. To obtain a permit, one can never have been legally denied gun possession, must not suffer mental illness or have been judged mentally incompetent, and cannot have been committed to a mental institution. Prospective permit-holders must pass firearms safety training, which addresses marksmanship and judicious shooting, the legal issues and mental conditioning for using deadly force, and techniques for weapons care, maintenance, handling, and storage.

Considering the statistics presented here plus the state's stringent requirements for concealed handgun permit-holders, why would any Arizona restaurant operator choose to disarm honest patrons and announce to armed lawbreakers the presence of easy prey on premises? Multiple queries to the parent company of the restaurant in this article's opening story have gone unanswered. Perhaps restauranteurs' "logic" is based on California Senator Diane Feinstein's claim that "Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe." To people willing to wrap themselves in illusion, Feinstein's silliness feels good. A sober, law-abiding adult at a table a few feet away with a gun that you'd never know she had unless she used it to stop a killer from killing you? That feels bad.

To anti-gunners who embrace false security, what's important is how it feels, not what's real. By not having concealed weapons in the same building with their food, restaurant patrons can savor "the sign" just before the killer who laughed at the sign swings into action. Diners would surely feel awful witnessing a gal with a gun stop a guy with a gun who was only crying for attention.

It's especially surprising that restaurants would be so resistant to having armed good citizens in their establishments. Two of the most devastating mass shootings in history occurred in restaurants full of unarmed innocent people - the McDonald's shooting in San Ysidro, CA in 1984 (22 dead, 19 wounded) and the Luby's shooting in Killeen, TX in 1991 (23 dead, 20 wounded). The San Ysidro shooting resulted in stricter California gun laws and an increase in violence. The Luby's shooting resulted in a "right to carry" law in Texas and a reduction in violence.

If I was a restaurant owner there's no question that I'd welcome legal gun permitholders into my restaurant and if a few liberals are scared to come in, all the better. They're probably lousy tippers anyway.