MacGyver

That is a good looking knife.  Is that jimping on the back of the blade or do they have some serration going on?

Neither of my children knew who he was.  We found some old episodes on PBS's site.  They did in fact recognize his neighborhood from Daniel Tiger.  I will say that Fred Rogers is timeless.  He was a hit with my kids.

That's exactly how I take the letter - "you guys let up or you're going to find yourselves unwelcome here."   It's a one time opportunity for these guys to change their course without more suffering more severe consequences of having these stores officially post.

The thing about Starbuck's letter, and their public posting of it, is that it is literally a shot across gun owners' bows.    They're giving us another chance - when they were likely advised to just post - because they just want to sell you a cup of coffee and a scone.  With their letter, they're broadcasting that they're willing to post - but would rather not force the issue.  Erik is right.  All open carriers are not the problem.  But a few of them are in a major way.   And there's the rub.  There's no winning hearts and minds here.  A gun is a tool used to do one thing - kill.  Maybe it's to protect your family.  Great.  Maybe it's to provide food for you table.  Awesome.  Maybe it's to keep the government off of your front porch.  Okay.  But, when a non-gun person looks at a person they don't know carrying a gun openly, they see a person who wants to kill somebody and today might be the day.  You might have some conversations with folks.  But regardless of whether or not the conversations end well, they all started out of fear - the fear that you might do something crazy with that gun.  You're not going to win.  Ever.   Our "rights" as gun owners have expanded more in the last 20 years than they have in the last century and a half.  You have more ability to carry today than any of us have had in our lifetimes.  And, those abilities are still expanding.  Ask anyone in Illinois 10 years ago if they'd ever be able to carry a gun to protect their families.  Despite that, however, individual people can screw that up.   The thing about strapping on a weapon, is that the moment you choose to do so, you either become an asset to society or a liability.  And, your actions speak for all of us collectively.  You do something stupid with that gun - and you paint us all in a poor light.  There's no place in civil society for a person to walk into Starbucks with a shotgun.  Your individual actions have just made it harder for all of us.  That's why so many of us get upset about this.  It's not about ceding our rights.  It's about selfish people doing stupid things that cost us all.

you know, I'll have to ask her if she knows who that is. Is he even on anymore, even in syndication? We're more of a Disney channel family - at least for the few hours cartoons are on and they may have the opportunity to watch TV. I never thought I would say it as a parent, but their lack of commercials for anything but other Disney cartoons during that time block is what gets them a pass.

Y'all are going to get my soapbox out before the day's over.    This is one that gets me riled up, and I wish that we could get people to actually put down their phones long enough to care.  Mind you, if I get going on it, I'll probably wind up having to report myself or something :)

Their double wall stainless travel cups are worth every penny.  I don't know if they put nuclear waste in between the layers or what, but I can make coffee at 0630 and it might be cool enough not to burn my tongue by 0900 or so.

Government sponsored monopoly and fiber optic?  Wow!  This is just too good when you reconcile that with stuff like PRISM.  I bet they don't even have to go to court.  They just build the splitter going to the NSA right into the system...   Not that you're apparently any better off with your local independent ISP.  The government has clearly shown that they can get that data as well even without the ISP's knowledge.

You can actually really tell just how much Starbucks just wants to sell a cup of coffee by their response. They could have very easily gone and posted their stores. Howard Schultz and his management team in all reality probably backed away from the advice they received from their counsel to post their stores. Why? They just want to sell a cup of coffee. That said, I'd bet anyone their favorite Starbucks fruity drink that we don't make it until Christmas without them being posted. The "I'm going to jam my 2nd Amendment rights down your damn throat" folks are going to see to that. If I win, I guess we'll have to get that drink at the drive thru.

Jay,   I didn't have a single member in mind when I composed the original post.  When I feel there's a need to call someone out individually, I'll do exactly that, but privately.   I'm asking folks to be mindful of their tone in whatever they post - but mentioned law enforcement here, as it's been a subject of a lot of the unduly negative posts of late.  The tipping point that caused me to write the post was being questioned by a couple of new members with whom I have relationships about the anti law enforcement tone.  They're new shooters and weren't able to reconcile how one group that carries guns can be so spiteful towards another group that carries guns.  They weren't complaining - they were seeking some clarification.  What struck me in both of the conversations was that if that was the first observation a new member to our site has, and it had enough of an impact to cause them to ask me about that instead of the myriad other new shooter questions they could ask, then we have an issue that needs to be addressed.   You won't find a bigger proponent of small government than me.  I can't call myself a "L"ibertarian, because I think that term has been coopted by people who aren't really sure what they believe.  But, we aren't trying to stifle any particular voices - unless, again you're only posting something to poke the proverbial hornet's nest and get people stirred up.    So long as anyone is bringing intelligent discourse to the table, we won't have a problem. 

Greg, please hear me say that this thread was not aimed at anyone.  Period.   Rather, we're in a pretty politically charged time, and the staff thought that we could all back away from the cliff with our rhetoric a little bit. 

Yet.  Give the "pro-2A" guys a week or so to force their hand.

Eric, my six year old saw your Avatar on my iPad last night and commented, that man looks really angry...   I couldn't quite explain to her that the picture wasn't really you :)

I've got a CTR on my 10.5" .458 SOCOM right now.  It's light and fast to come on target.  Plus, as a bonus, you get a free Magpul tattoo with every shot!   It's not really that bad.  It's not like you're firing hundreds of rounds through it.

I commonly edit posts to remove language, offensive links, and personal information that someone may not want shared.  As a general rule, when I do this, I leave the "edited by" comment visible, and leave a reason.   I figure if it was my post, I'd rather have it cleaned up than removed altogether.  The poster always retains the right to go back in and re-express themselves in a more appropriate manner.

I think I can get that squared away.  Good idea.

Register a complaint around here and you're likely to die of old age before we cede to your list of demands. This was absolutely not driven by complaints. As I said in the original post, it's us as a staff keeping our fingers on the pulse of the community and noticing something off. We've got a good thing here that we don't particularly want to see screwed up. We thought posting some guidance as opposed to making hard and fast rule changes in the TOS would be more than sufficient for the vast majority of our membership.

Here's the thing, y'all. We're not trying to ban any topic. Nor are we saying you have to be pro law enforcement. Lord knows I'm critical of a lot that's going on right now, and I love to discuss issues big and small. But, if you're going to engage in a discussion, make sure you're actually adding to the debate. Do that and you're fine. If a thread devolves, we'll lock it. We don't do this very much now, and I don't expect to going forward. My original post was just giving you guys some insight into how we're looking at things as moderators.

All people need to do is ask whether or not they're adding to the discussion and the community or distracting from it. If the answer is the latter, then our general position is that they either need better rhetoric, a better position or should simply refrain from posting.

The very fact that you can't type his name in without having voldemort substituted in should tell you exactly how we feel about giving this guy another second of airtime.

Exactly.

I've banned more than one person for not being able to refer to gay people without the use of a slur.  There's a famous post by one of our moderating team relating to the tendency to profile people who may look middle eastern and the problems associated with it.    The DNC doesn't need our help.  They've yet to meet a sure thing that they can't screw up.   But your point stands.  We can discuss big issues.  We've got a lot of diverse opinions.  But, if you're just here to stir stuff up, we're going to take notice because it's affecting the community at large.

One of the great draws to this site from my perspective is that it doesn't need a lot of moderating.  I probably make as many administrative actions as anyone, and I bet I've not made a dozen this year.  This community does a pretty good job of policing itself.   But, of late, we've noticed a few people just posting things to stir people up.  It's causing discord, and that's what tells me that we to be more involved than we typically are.    I get it that we live in a stressful time.  We're in a politically charged, bipolar world.  While there really are a lot of people with moderate opinions, all of the voices are at the extreme ends of the spectrum.    And it's certainly not just TGO - I was proxy to a conversation the other day with a bunch of kids.  They were discussing who they would look for if they got lost.  Out of 20 of them, not one said a police officer.  When someone asked if they might look for a police officer, several of them immediately shook their heads, no.    I could certainly put together a completely concrete, "non-arbitrary" list of rules for posting about law enforcement.  But, that's our intent.  We're just trying to give some insight into what influences our decision making process.

There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of it needs more good discourse than it currently gets.  We can discuss big issues here.  There are cases where individual officers are lacking in tact or judgment or both.  There are a ton of departments that need better training when it comes to this stuff.  But, it's too easy and not at all fair to the dialog to paint all cops with a bad cop brush.       We're shooting from the hip here, Mac.  You've got to start somewhere.  But, we do trust our staff to make these decisions.  Even though the bench is a bit thin of late - there are really only a few active mods right now - we're depending on them to make appropriate calls, and we do discuss most moderating decisions.  Like I said earlier, we're always happy to provide reasoning for our decisions.   I guess at the end of the day, we're just trying to make this place somewhere people actually want to spend time.

This really isn't intended to apply to single threads or topics - it applies more to members who have no interest in anything but having a platform for their particular cause/obsession.  We don't boot many folks on TGO.  We don't need to.  But, to give you some insight into what I look for when trying to make these decisions, I almost always look at their last 20 posts.  If there's not a single one that's firearm related, you're probably in the wrong place.   You're right.  It's not going to be easy.  That's why we pay our staff so much and regularly enter them into popularity contests.  :)