Starbucks admits the risk to its employees and customers by banning guns at its Starbucks' corporate headquarters. Why should only senior management be protected? Gunshot accidents have already been reported in Starbucks stores.
For better or worse, today much social change seems to gain traction only at the consumer-retail level:
According to Elliot Fineman, CEO of the National Gun Victims Action Council (NGAC), we are at the "secondhand smoke" moment in the gun debate--the moment when people realized that smokers endangered everyone not just themselves and they were no longer tolerated. When corporations and consumers stood up to Big Tobacco and banned smoking in stores, restaurants and public spaces, laws soon followed.Like second-hand smoke, the public is now beginning to see that gun proliferation is a constant threat to children and innocent bystanders that is getting worse through the aggression of gun rights' activists and lawmakers' inaction.
But even Starbucks, aka Evil Inc., cannot top the hypocrisy of our U.S. Congress. You can't very well carry a firearm into congressional galleries or hearing rooms. Even crazy pro-gun Republicans aren't so stupid as to risk getting shot by other crazies, even as they promote gun-owners' "right" to put Americans' lives at risk everywhere else.
By Martha Rosenberg
March 28, 2013 | AlterNet
