God bless America. Where else would you find an entrepreneur who would react to a new law allowing guns in bars (unless specifically prohibited) by thinking “Let’s make a website people can check to see if a particular restaurant allows guns! We could serve both pro AND anti-gun diners, whilst getting press for being anti-gun-in-bars!” Wasn’t there a Mickey Rooney movie like that? And are we sure that there are enough Volunteer State diners that care enough about guns in restaurants that they’d check a website? Anyway, I’m impressed . . .
The site’s founder even has a neat logo: a fork with wings. And it seems that there are 105 restaurants [that might be] paying Ray Friedman, a Vanderbilt University management professor, and his daughter, Toni, a Hume-Fogg High School student, for the privilege of appearing on Gun Free Dining Tennessee.
Friedman noted that polls have shown that most Tennessee residents don’t want to allow guns in restaurants or bars. He said he hopes the site can have a “free-market” impact. By voting with their pocketbooks, diners might be able to force some establishments to change their policies.
“By and large, it will be in the economic interests of restaurants to be gun-free,” Friedman said.
tennessean.com neglects to mention another possibility. Aren’t there people who would avoid a gun-free restaurant as a potential killing field, nor forgetting that the Luby’s diner massacre was the event that started the liberalization of conceal carry laws in the first place? Which would kind of make that flying fork an unintentionally ironic symbol . . .
