This piece in the NewYorker seems a mature look at the status quo:
I think Starbucks kind of got unfairly pulled into the whole gun debate. To me it’s very obvious they adopted the same stance that say, McDonald’s has because they are a large national corporation that operate in places with extremely liberal residents and extremely conservative residents. So just like another omnipresent chain (McDonald’s) they took the closest thing to neutral that they could: they don’t encourage guns in their store, and they deferred to local laws. Deferring to local laws is a pretty neutral thing, it’s not embracing guns or rejecting them, it’s just saying “the law is what it is and we choose to make no further policies on the matter.”
For some reason, despite other large, visible chains like McDonald’s having 100% the same position, the pro-gun crowd really started doing a lot of stuff at Starbucks and emphasizing Starbucks’ position. This lead to one of the Mother’s Against Guns groups to boycott Starbucks every Saturday and to start a petition drive aimed at getting Starbucks to ban guns in its stores (in response to the Saturday boycotts the pro-gun groups made that day “Starbucks Appreciation Day” to try and drive more business to the stores in areas where this was happening.) So really through no outright political statement or position Starbucks ended up in the middle of this thing. Which got them exactly what they were trying to avoid, potentially alienating customers on both sides.
I think the letter released today was their best, latch ditch hope to get the “gun rhetoric” out of Starbucks so they can keep selling overpriced coffee which is what they’re in the business of doing. If it doesn’t work I think they’ll probably institute an outright ban, because if they have to pick which side to piss off the pro-gun side probably is the easier given the personal politics of the CEO and etc.
The only reason I can fathom Starbucks got so much attention from the pro-gun crowd initially could be that it’s a Seattle headquartered company, which is a definitively lefty area, and they sell highly marked up coffee and coffee-drinks which is seen as a more lefty/liberal version of a product basically all Americans consume. The pro-gun types targeting McDonald’s I guess didn’t make as much sense, because McDonald’s isn’t at all associated with either side of the political spectrum but is instead more seen as a lowest common denominator food dispenser.
How about a Gunfight at the car wash?
Two fewer CCW fans in Michigan…
I’m intimidated and frightened by young African-American males*, statistically the group most likely to commit assault, robbery and murder. I think they should be banned from Starbucks. Unless you have some idea that profiling is wrong.
*Yes, I’m snarking.
The article says nothing about his predilection for firearms, only that he has a powerful hunting rifle. You know, like the ordinary 30.06 bolt-action rifles you can buy in any outdoors store? And for that matter the naval yard shooter who went in with a shotgun. A shotgun, not an evil Killomatic 5000 assault weapon, not even a concealed handgun. You want to make it illegal to own hunting weapons without a license?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is another bad guy with a gun? Or is that two good guys with guns?
An armed society is a polite society?
Which one should have been permitted to stand his ground?
In seriousness, this kind of thing is my point about this stuff. My position is that the problem with guns is not guns, it’s the intersection between guns and people. Sure, some people should categorically not be allowed access to firearms. However, everyone varies so much over the course of a day or a few days, let alone a lifetime, such that there will be occasions for everyone where for at least some period of time they are vulnerable to being unsafe with a firearm.
It’s just blinkered ignorance that pretends if we increase the number of people with firearms we will reduce the damages associated with firearms incidents. People are too fallible to pretend otherwise.
Since there’s no report of bystanders being hurt, I’ll chalk this incident up to pure Darwinian selection. Two people too stupid or hotheaded to realize that a gun isn’t for teaching some jerkass a lesson. If carry was ubiquitous, I’d say after a century or so a culture of restraint and responsibility would prevail, and those that couldn’t or wouldn’t learn it would self-cull.
ETA: or as one person put it, “Stupidity should hurt”.
If we get rid of all the people who are at some point in time too angry, too depressed, too distracted, too anxious, or too cognitively impaired to be safe with a gun, the human race will be ended.
It is short.sighted hubris to think that you belong in a fundamentally different category from these two guys.
Therefore, the only solution is to limit the access to guns. The survival of the human race demands it! (according to you). 
Better reword that argument if you want it to fly, Orville.
What do you propose instead? That only the armed are fit to survive?
Or we can follow the proven examples of pretty much every other *civilized *nation in the world.
Not sure what I need to reword, and your restatement is not accurate.
What you quoted from me was in response to the idea that in a generation or so we would cull the genetic pool so as to be rid of people who might be at some point be “stupid” with a gun. I’m saying if you did cull such people, there would essentially be nobody left.
Isn’t it more like, “no shirt, no shoes, no service?”
And yet the CCW permitting process was unable to ferret that out before they terminated each other. Anything we can do about that?
Our tendency to focus on deaths in mass shootings has obscured the scope of the problem.
When considering incidents that involve four or more people getting shot (including the shooter himself) as mass shootings, we have had 250 mass shootings this year.
250 this year - that is essentially one mass shooting every day.
We have a fucking problem in this country.
Honest question–how does that compare with the worldwide stats? Everything I can find focuses on the US rate only.
That may be entirely unfair to one of the victims. Imagine you’re being harassed on the road in a “road rage” incident, and you pull into a car wash, either your intended destination or an attempt to exit the situation. The crazy SOB follows you, continues to argue with you, and pulls a gun. This is the exact moment where self defense advocates say that there needs to be a good guy with a gun, right? Except guns aren’t magic, and defensive gun use is messy, so you end up returning fire only moderately successfully, and end up bleeding out in the process.
If that happens, you OK with people saying you got what you deserved?
Anti-gun people have argued that adding guns to the mix, even in self defense like this situation possibly was, can escalate bad situations into potentially deadly ones. If only one of these guys had been armed, they both might be alive. If neither had been armed, we wouldn’t be talking about them.
I concur. The non-crazy guy attempted to get away, and stepped away from the car where his family was. As near as I can tell from the various version of the story I’ve read, he did what he was supposed to do here.
Exactly. In much the same way that the fact that Britain has more assaults but the US has more homicides suggests that there may be a reason why altercations in the US tend to result in death more often.
Not sure that getting out of your car to confront someone during a road rage incident is what you should do. I wonder if he felt empowered to do so by the fact that he was armed.
Hard to say. OTOH, if you feel that a gun battle is likely the least you can do is to stand away from any innocent bystanders.
Well, I just did a spin of the matter on the internets. Recommendations for how to deal with someone else instigating a road rage incident included disengaging, taking four right hand turns and driving to a police station. Not a single one of them suggested pulling off into a parking lot and getting into a fracas.