Frank Clarke.
“It’s sad to see a highly-respected American corporation cravenly bending the knee to the forces of darkness. It shows a lack of courage. It shows a lack of foresight. It shows a lack of knowledge or, worse, a rejection of knowledge.
Only two states, Texas and Florida, keep statistics on “does this arrestee have a weapons permit?”. The data from these two states is startling. Lawful gun-carriers are arrested (not convicted, just arrested) at rates between 1/7th and 1/13th the rate for the general population, depending on the year chosen. What that means is that the people who go to the trouble of getting a carry permit are among the safest, most law-abiding people in the country. As a class, they are more law-abiding than the police, and your policy is to insult them and treat them as if they were criminals-in-waiting. Was that your intent or did you simply not think this all the way through?
Recall, as well, that on August 8th, an ordinary citizen — not law enforcement — stopped a potential mass shooting at a Wal-Mart in Springfield MO. Are you publicly asserting that you don’t want any of your customers intervening to stop such incidents in your stores? That would be a surprise, and not a pleasant one, either.
Principles are funny things. They sometimes cause us to say things or do things that others — often ‘others who lack much in the way of principles’ — interpret negatively. That is, alas, what Publix’s latest announcement looks like. It looks like Publix flinched in order to avoid ‘bad PR’ from people whose thinking doesn’t extend beyond “guns bad”. Those same people see the world as full of evildoers who wish nothing so much as to harm others. In such a world, people with guns are a positive danger.
You might suspect that I hold a different view, and you would be correct. I believe our world, despite the occasional ‘bad apple’, is full of loving people who care about their neighbors and want them to live happy, safe, and prosperous lives.
How do you see the world?”
