TexasCHLforum.com

MeMelYup wrote:I have seen rv's parked in Sam's clubs and multiple WAL-mart's parking lots for a week at a time.

Yep. And those are the "fringe" in the RV community who jeopardize the opportunity for the rest of the travelers to have a relatively safe place to pull over for a few hours. If the stores themselves don't prohibit extended parking periods, the surrounding towns often do.

There is an element that I didn't mention. It is called "full timers". These are people who have no permanent home and live in their RVs year round. Some are migrant construction or oil field workers. Others are retired people who decided that they really didn't need a permanent location or the increasing costs that go with it. Part of that group are the ones who will push the limits of their stays in Wal-Marts, etc. I had an interesting thread going with two of them on IRV2.com who believe it is their right to use commercial lots to park overnight. One of them "hides" their RV on RV for sale lots. I'm really surprised that they can get away with it and don't get a lot of visits from local LEOs

But I don't want to get to far afield here. The relevance to this thread is that there always seems to be a fringe element on every issue that involves a commercial business that keeps trying to draw that business back into the middle of a political firefight, directly or indirectly. As I said earlier, I'm somewhat conflicted by wanting to stand up in public for my rights and not allow the antis, through sheer numbers in protests, to bully businesses and even parts of the government in to acquiescing to their demands. At the same time, I fully understand that gaining public acceptance requires thoughtful and low-key work, the results of which have yielded us good results for CHL in Texas. That it is not everything I would prefer it to be shouldn't cause me to act in a way that undermines that progress. It means tamping down the visceral response that I have to the often illegal actions of the protestors in favor of steps that achieve the goal.

tommyg wrote:I think Star Buck requested that you don't bring guns in to their stores to get the gun grabbers to shut up
Remember it is a request and concealed means concealed. They don't like being sucked into the gun issue
they want to sell coffee. Carry into Starbucks just keep it hid and drink your coffee

I cannot help but relate the Starbucks situation to a similar type of one between Wal-Mart and RVers.

Wal-Mart corporate policy is to allow individual stores to permit the parking of RVs in their parking lots overnight where it is not prohibited by local laws. This is a good thing for many RVers because it provides an opportunity to get off the road for a few hours where trying to find, sign into and park at a campground in the middle of the night is not practical.

Some of the campground owners didn't like Wal-Mart's policy and lobbied local governments to ban big box store parking in general for "safetly" reasons. A campground owner's association assisted some of its members in getting the local bans in place, raising the ire of many RVers who then boycotted those campgrounds.

Some RVers took advantage of the overnight hospitality at Wal-Mart, parking for several days, putting out rugs and lawn chairs, cooking on grills even holding dumping tanks in the storm drains. Wal-Mart could have easily made the decision to outright ban all RV parking because of these hassles but they also recognize that RVers are good customers and spend a lot of money in their stores.

In the end, there is a booklet of Wal-Marts where overnight parking is banned but Wal-Mart's policy remains leaving the rest to make local decisions. This gives local managers the discretion to deal with individual RVers who cannot mind their manners and generally welcomes all others.

As you might imagine, the RV forums were inundated with posts about Wal-Mart, both pro and con to the point where several of them banned Wal-Mart related threads. Those threads contained strong opinions on both sides (and the usual dose of personal attacks) In the mean time, Wal-Mart did its best to remain above the fray. They are in business to sell stuff, not be sucked into the RV parking problem. Today, the opinion in the RV community is mixed about whether or not RV is pro or anti-RVs. For me, that says that Wal-Mart's attempt to not take sides was successful.

I suspect that Starbucks is in exactly the same position.

CoffeeNut wrote:This is kind of disappointing but I've never seen a Starbucks with 30.06 and until I do they'll still get my infrequent business. I did participate in one of the "Starbucks Appreciation Days" and the place was slammed. My only form of "appreciation" was buying a coffee and burning up their wifi with my "I Love Guns and Coffee" emblazoned laptop.

I can understand why a corporation is fed up with their locations being treated as protest points that may or may not scare away customers but I can also see why us gun folk would want to make a point especially when there are so few mainstream places that would even tolerate open carry in their stores today.

If I'm not mistaken, this was the genesis of the Starbucks problem. The Antis organized a boycott of all of the stores that tolerated OC and all but Starbucks folded. Starbucks said that it would abide by the law and that OC was legal. Now, Starbucks, too, has folded. I'm not surprised. Seattle is hardly the hot bed of 2nd Amendment support and being the only one left out on a limb, Starbucks became the focal point of the antis actions.

I'm really conflicted about this. The protestors have proven time and time again that action beats inaction. When they protested at the homes of the bank executives, those bank executives abandoned good business sense and started making stupid housing loans - that lead us to the mortgage crisis. They picket illegally, do so with impunity on private property and seem to be winning the vast majority of these conflicts, this being the latest. I have seen very few of of these situations where a calmed, reasoned approach was successful. Only the Scott Walker recall and this year's abortion debate in Austin come to mind. Even with the latter, Davis and her minions were initially successful.

I agree with Anygun - if we employed similar tactics, we would all be arrested and prosecuted. I'm really getting tired of the media, law enforcement and the power of the government being used against me and my freedoms. At some point, we're going to have to figure out a way to counter the protest mindset or we are simply going to continue to get overrun and our freedoms diminished. I wish I had a better solution than counter-protests but I don't.