I’m up for a good protest

Some of you may be a little too young to recall the really good protests. Like the American Revolution; it made the history books, it was so effective. In my lifetime I've helped a few along, but it’s been a long time. Not since the great salad bowl boycott of the seventies, in support of Caesar Chavez.

I wonder if we can do something about guns. Not about the right to own one, but about the need to display one’s full armament. I’m referring to the open carry laws, and the owners who believe it’s proper to stand in front of department stores, restaurants, grocery stores, locked and whatever else they say, displaying their values to small children hurried along by their parents.

We cannot make them go home, have open carry parties in the privacy of their own back yards. We can make the mega corporations of America pay for not taking a stand against public displays of weapons on their premises. There are more than a few corporations that have allowed demonstrations of open carry, whether through cowardice or complicity I do not know.

But, if we know what we think, there is something we can do. Boycott them. Ask our friends, our co-workers, people from high school who friended us on Facebook—boycott them. So we don’t dilute our efforts, let’s start with a big, easy one—Target. Let’s target Target. We want a public policy of not permitting a visible gun anywhere on store property, outside or in. Until it happens, we’ll take our money elsewhere.

I’d like to think we could put the genie back in the bottle one discarded regulation after another. No openly carried weapons. Then, no concealed weapons. No unsecured weapon in any home. But, we have to start somewhere, and let’s start with open carry and Target.

Find another place to buy the kid’s back to school socks and underwear, notebooks and Elmer’s. But, before you spend any money, ask Google if that chain has a policy against open carry weapon displays. If it does not, query another. Start with Target, but don’t stop there.

We are the people with the purchasing power. Let’s put our money where our mouth is. If you do not live in the USA, but believe guns belong behind closed doors, help us. Target has stores in Canada and India. Please, just don’t shop there. Thank you.