And they are giddy!

According to the CNBC article:

The request is simply we recognize everyone’s rights,” said Panera CEO Ron Shaich during a phone interview Monday. “But we also recognize that we are building communities in our cafes and are where people come to catch a breath.”
“We’re simply respectfully requesting that people leave their guns at home,” he added. “It’s that simple.”

While the request is new, Panera plans to continue to follow state and local laws regarding firearm policy. The chain also won’t ask employees to enforce the new request or place signs about it in its restaurants.

“We’re certainly not going to put our associates in the position of confronting someone carrying a gun,” he said. “We won’t put our café management in the position of being law enforcement.”

So basically is one of those “moral support” stances that are designed to look good to a certain shrilly minority than actually be effective. Let’s face it: Shannon Watts knows well that in several states, not even the signs carry lawful weight much less a press release. In Florida, you can have a 2 feet by 3 feet sign announcing you don’t allowing guns in your place of business and they can be ignored by anybody legally carrying a concealed firearm.

PS: IMHO Panera is an overly expensive bakery with a crappy product, I get better bread at Publix. But Panera has WiFi and it is a hipster place because they are organic/PC/FOBS (Full of BS)

When Ronald Ritchie called 911 from the aisles of a Walmart in western Ohio last month to report that a black man was “walking around with a gun in the store”, he said that shoppers were coming under direct threat.

“He’s, like, pointing it at people,” Ritchie told the dispatcher. Later that evening, after John Crawford III had been shot dead by one of the police officers who hurried to the scene in Beavercreek, Ritchie repeated to reporters: “He was pointing at people. Children walking by.”

One month later, Ritchie puts it differently. “At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody,” the 24-year-old said, in an interview with the Guardian. He maintained that Crawford was “waving it around”, which attorneys for Crawford’s family deny.

via “Ex-Marine” Who SWATted Black Shopper To Death in Wal-Mart Changes His Story – Bearing Arms.

I am gonna jump the gun, call this one a SWATing and get it over with. Ronald Ritchie got himself a lawyer probably because the hard evidence is gonna be enough to at least indict him for Manslaughter.  Is he the only dumb bastard in the Western hemisphere that does not know 911 records all the calls and Wal-Mart has more surveillance cameras than London? John Crawford deserves justice.

And God Forbid he is a member of a Gun Control cult/group.

Sometimes Hollywood producers will astound you with their supreme stupidity by cancelling a show for what can only be defined as imbecility.

In this era of “reality tv” is easy to understand that a low-cost TV show is appealing as hell to the bean-counters. But when you manage to get a good scripted TV show with not only good ratings but the best rating of any scripted show in your network which means it is bringing in viewers to the point advertisers are willing to pay extra, and you decide to kill the show, you are a frigging moron.

Longimire confirms that the theory of a Gary Copper High Noon character is alive and well and sells dispelling the notion that Justifed was just a hiccup on a TV line-up ridden with multi-pregnant moms and semi-celebrities behaving badly on a weekly basis. But apparently cop shows that do not happen in NY or Chicago or LA are somehow not gritty/edgy enough and therefore not  cool.

The characters in Longmire are all balanced according to the PC Police’s rules for equality across genders/minority count, but they have a general flaw: They are human. That means they can be good or bad or whatever they are with no special moral superiority just because you are not Anglo and that might have pissed off the Network that could not control a  bunch of Redneck Duck Hunters.  Bad guys run the gamut and the two top ones are the obligatory Anglo and a full blood Indian (sorry, Native American) who has no qualms in invoking the plight of his people while squeezing the shit out of them. That also means they have a script that does not give a damn about conventional TV wisdom which is a refreshing breeze across the Media Wasteland of today and makes the show entertaining.

And if the above are not reasons enough, I have two words for you: Katee Sackhoff.

And now, a word from Craig Johnson, the author of the Longmire books from which the series is based.

In a January 2011 incident at a Wal-Mart in Layton, three employees confronted a man who had put a laptop computer down his pants and escorted him to a security office. There, the man showed them a gun and, the employees claim, pushed it into one of their backs.

The three grabbed the gun away and pinned him against a wall before police arrived. They were fired because Wal-Mart said they should have allowed the man leave the office and not wrestled with him.

via Fired Wal-Mart workers say they have right to self-defense | The Salt Lake Tribune.

I am gonna say out front that this was a BS decision by Wal-Mart. We are not talking about going after the guy and doing a whole take-down-Gecko-45 thing but the shoplifter was already detained and inside the security office.  The initial event was over and when the critter pulled out the gun, there was simply no time to go over the SOP handbook and check what was supposed to be done but react and avoid unnecessary blood spillage.

Wal-Mart assumes that the bad guy was simply going to walk away which is a possibility but not necessarily  the only outcome. Gambling using your life as collateral is idiotic but when it is a corporate order is criminal.

My take (and with the caveat that the info we have is accurate) is that the employees should be re-hired and that the loss prevention practices should be revised!  Maybe the error is enclosing a possible dangerous person in a room away from witnesses and back up.

But then again it is easier to fire  three associates than the idiotic upper managers that came with the idea.

If you are a regular visitor of this blog, you know I recommend Andrew Branca’s book plenty plus he drops from time to time to visit to inform and correct when I post some messed up legal interpretation.  You can find Andrew in the jungles of Twitter fighting the good fight and he is damn good about it. It is better than Pay per View MMA and sometimes bloodier.

So basically he will hurt the feelings of those who seek being butthurt and for free. Some of those butthurt have taken to give his book One Star reviews in Amazon, but sincerely they are not the smartest bunch in the interwebs. My favorite is this guy Shawn:

I learned more about “self defense law” from reading wikipedia or www.thetruthaboutguns.com. I would AVOID this book. I wish I could sell it to another sucker, but it would cost me too much in postage so instead, I will take it to use as toilet paper in a public bathroom.

I love the scatological reference as it is a clear indication of somebody who still is trying hard to pass his GED, but the ultimate fail is the version of the book he is reviewing, the Kindle version.

The mental picture of Shawn trying to scrape himself  clean in some urine-&-feces soaked public restroom using a Kindle device is something for the ages… and I imagine something Amazon never designed its reader to do. I wonder if it is covered by their warranty.

UPDATE: Shawn’s review was removed. I wonder why. But the internet is forever and screen captures are a lovely way to keep track of the stupid.

The podcast is getting better and better with no help from moi.

And It should be available soon in iTunes.