You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Killing the messenger.
My Facebook page is lighting up with angry rhetoric.
Why?
Because certain issues get people nuts.
Pot people hate anti pot stories.
Gun people hate anti gun stories.
Some people are so passionate they get on the internet and vomit their every visceral thought.
And after they are done attacking the people in the story, they attack the people who simply wrote the story of what other people thought and said.
That’s me tonight.
It’s 90 minutes to air time and I’m sitting on a hand grenade of controversy.
The pin is tied to a motorcycle gang that is about to burn rubber out of a pool hall parking lot.
The issue?
A security guard who has been asked to come to work tomorrow without his firearm.
Take away a man’s gun?
Lord have mercy. That’s Un-American!
Christ, it’s worse than that. It’s blasphemous!
It’s like urinating in the confessional, it’s like throwing a molotov cocktail through a stained glass window.
Take away a man’s gun? That’s like plucking food out of an infant’s mouth on live UNICEF TV.
Someone get me my shotgun ma. I gotta kill me something.
I have no dog in this fight. I could care less whether this security numb nuts carry a fire arm or not?
Honestly, I wouldn’t blink twice going into a parking lot that had an armed security officer yawning at attention near the front of the lot.
Honestly? Who cares.
And if God forbid, gang warfare breaks out, perhaps he can squeeze off a couple of rounds before he’s capped and dropped and buried.
But not everyone feels that way in America.
In America, there are some hot button issues that will bring the crazies out of the woodwork?
Abortion?
Prayer in Schools?
Guns.
Guns are always hot.
They’re hot like 36 D’s at a Comecon Convention.
People either hate guns or people love guns.
GUNS. GUNS. GUNS.
Need I say more?
I am simply the messenger, but I am going to be slaughtered like a lamb driving through a car wash filled with Cutco Knives.
My story is about a group of people who don’t hate guns, per se, but they hate the idea that a security guard is carrying a gun in a NO GUN ZONE.
Their point?
It’s a conflict for the company to have a no gun zone and then hire security guards who carry guns.
Hmmmm?
Makes sense, right?
But 2nd amendment enthusiasts are animated, hot, angry that a gun anywhere on this tiny blue spheroid is getting holstered.
Still others are happy that they can dine in peace, without the threat of a gun outside the restaurant.
Holy which side is right? Batman!
The Panera is on 21st street in a posh section of Nashville.
The restaurant recently hired a new security firm to patrol the parking lot.
The old guards use to dress like traffic cones and direct people around the lot and warn them they’d be towed if they snuck over to the Taco Co.
But the new security team is bad ass.
They are dressed in black camouflage and look like some Black Ops crew headed for the Middle East.
This security team is packing heat.
The group of restraunteers complained to the corporate offices who asked the local manager to take action.
I spoke with the local manager.
I think his over all impression of this controversy is “What a F***ing Hassel.”
Adding fuel to the 2nd amendment beat down?
The CEO of Panera pledged that the restaurant would be a gun free zone.
OOOOPS!
Patrons found it hypocritical that an armed security guard was patrolling a parking lot in a company that declared its restaurant a gun free zone.
Hmmm?
“their policy is they don’t want guns on premises and they ‘ve got a guy in the parking lot with a gun seems like a conflict,” the woman tells me.
What troubles you about it? I ask.
I equate guns with police. I see a SWAT guy and I think something is wrong she says. “It surprised me. It was alarming.”
So I write this story, staying as far out of the fray as possible.
with 90 minutes till air time, I asked this simple question on FACEBOOK :Should a Panera restaurant ask its security guards to stop carrying firearms in the parking lot?
BLAM. SPLATT. BANG.
Hiding in the ether of the internet, slathered in mustard and anonymity, gun proponents and anti-gun groups are going to war.
It is a digital barrage of hate, of conflict, of differences of opinion.
The points of view are so diametrically opposed, it reminds me of William Wallace’s mercenaries running down the hill at full speed and colliding with the king’s men in a bloody, combustible collision.
I don’t care, but obviously, thousands of people with no life and a wireless account do.
A man without a gun. A restaurant without protection?
Safe? Vulnerable?
Battle lines are drawn. Only time will tell.
Life’s Crazy™