Yay, Free Enterprise

The whole banana by Col Bateman guest-posting on Charlie Pierce's blog:

Last week I mentioned the harassment that the women of Mothers Demand Action Against Gun Violence received in the past few months since the group was initiated on Facebook. The hatred is real, violent, and should not be ignored. What I did not appreciate at the time is the reason why the rabid gun advocates were so angry with these women. Now I know.

"Open Carry Texas" (which I think of as "Wimps With Mommy Issues"), conducted an open carry, en masse, at a Chipotle Restaurant — then the moms shared the word. They posted pictures of these morons carrying rifles in a family restaurant. Then they asked that the chain bar weapons on their private property. As Founder Shannon Watts put it: "The Chipotle petition received more than 10,000 signatures within just a few hours." The corporation realized where their business interests lie and that guns are wrong in their establishments across the entire nation.

In a statement Chipotle released Monday, the company said, "the display of firearms in our restaurants has now created an environment that is potentially intimidating or uncomfortable for many of our customers."

These women are doing what nobody else had managed to do before now. They are actually affecting change. Not through legislation, but through the free choice they have to patronize, or to NOT patronize, private companies that allow guns to be carried in their stores, restaurants, malls, and more.

Watts has become a target, and a heroine. She is the sort of woman that I want my daughters to grow up to be, facing a threat to our nation and taking it head on. Is she afraid? Of course. Anyone would be in her situation. Gun advocates (most who identify themselves as such are also NRA members) have threatened her life, they have threatened to rape her, they have threatened her family, and they have demonstrated their earnestness by showing up at her house. But she has not stopped, she has not quit, and she has not backed down.

This is moral courage, and indeed physical courage, of the highest order.