seamusTX wrote:I won't make any new friends around here for saying so, but boycotts work only when they are carefully managed and publicized with a core of supporters that appeal to the popular imagination.
The
Montgomery bus boycott is the classic example in American social life.
In further support of this logic, I will point out why the Montgomery boycott worked so well. It had nothing to do with the bus company itself. The problem was that the people refusing to ride the bus started walking to work instead. This gave them significantly less time, and made them more tired, at work. And many of them were household help in the upper class society's homes. Not having their help made the society wives upset at the situation. And then they put pressure on their husbands to fix the problem.
While I will admit that a big enough economic boycott would work, I agree that Katy Mills and Grapevine Mills malls will not miss the amount of money we and our families spend there. We would need to convince enough of the public that the lack of CHLs makes the mall so unsafe that no one should go there for it to work. And, since we are all agreed that the CHL is not a police badge, we cannot in good faith make this claim.
What we need to do is figure out how to convince the vast public to support us. We need an argument that makes us more sympathetic to the public. I do not want another shooting, but this is what Dr. Gratia-Hupp was able to do after the Killeen Luby's shooting. From that, we got CHLs in Texas. Lacking something to make our case more sympathetic, all we can do is support public relations and education campaigns like Charles Cotton has started. The more people we convince that shooting is fun and a family sport, the better we are in our efforts to improve the legal environment for guns in Texas.