During a lapdog interview with a restaurant owner offering a discount to customers with concealed carry permits, Brian Kilmeade said unwittingly, “The thing is, everybody knows now... if I go in there, I might get shot.”
After his restaurant was robbed, owner Arthur “Art” Bouvier said he decided that what his restaurant needs is having as many armed customers as possible.
Bouvier told Kilmeade that when the restaurant was robbed, his cashier “defused the situation fairly well” and not all of the money had been taken. But later, according to Bouvier, a customer said he had been “watching the situation and was armed, ready to take action if it became life or death but not until then.”
“I decided that’s actually a very good idea. So we’re fairly friendly in personal freedom and carry circles so I decided to open up to my customers that I will reward that sort of behavior from stable, legal, licensed citizens.”
Now I get how traumatic the robbery likely was. But I, for one, feel more threatened at the idea of someone at the next table from me deciding it’s time for a shootout in a crowded room than I am about the till getting robbed. In fact, it feels a whole lot like my life is being put in more jeopardy for some unproven theory that it will save Bouvier money.
Kilmeade seemed to see the other side of Bouvier’s plan, too. But Kilmeade nonetheless made sure we all think Bouvier’s a great guy. “And you’ve lost some customers, though, because of this, right? And that saddens you,” Kilmeade said sympathetically.
“I have,” Bouvier conceded. “I mean, obviously, it’s a polarizing issue.” But he wasn’t very sympathetic to those diners’ concerns. He said they were “probably dining right along licensed carriers before and just didn’t know it. The message to me is that they are more comfortable with the thug that was in line illegally than the ones in the dining room, legally.”
Instead of pointing out that now Bouvier is encouraging a room packed with packers, rather than a stray carrier, Kilmeade tried to suggest that customers would be safer now. But it didn’t quite come out that way. Kilmeade said, “And Art, the thing is, everybody knows now, including a would-be criminal, if I go in there, I might get shot and my hope is and your hope is, they don’t go in there.”
Bouvier didn’t seem to catch what Kilmeade had just said. Or maybe Bouvier only wants armed customers. “That’s my entire hope,” he said, that they just don’t go in. I don’t want to have a situation, I want to defuse one before it is there.”
Kilmeade closed by saying, “He’s taking action because he doesn’t want to be a victim.”
Watch the Freudian slip below, from the October 27 Fox & Friends.
(H/T NewsHound Richard)
Ellen, you mention the obvious problem of some panicked gun-nut (I know a couple of people who fit the profile) going crazy and killing/injuring innocents. It could be as innocent as stray bullets going through thin walls and killing the cook in the back flipping hash.
However, in the campus case the guy rightly worried he’d be mistaken by law enforcement officers responding to the incident as one of the shooters.
And don’t tell some NRA foamer that the standard right-wing meme the correlation between gun control and high crime isn’t clear-cut because when I proved to one NRA nutjob it’s cherry-picked bulls**t my reward was watching his head explode like a nuclear cloud.
The allegedly armed customer claims he WOULD have done something but only IF “it became life or death but not until then.” So, a “good guy with a gun” (the type the NRA and the gun nuts always wish for) who was present in the restaurant didn’t do anything to stop the “bad guy with a gun.” I guess the “good guy with a gun” just wanted to finish his oh-so-important dinner rather than be bothered lending any help to the poor cashier with the gun in his/her face.
And, of course, these idiots don’t stop to think about a situation where an armed robber might have an accomplice (or several accomplices) sitting in the restaurant just waiting for the robbery to happen.
