Some Questions for the Gun Store Owner With the “Muslim-Free Zone”

When a gun shop owner announces he’s closing because he’s tired of selling arms to young, disturbed white guys wearing rebel flags, that will be a YouTube video worth watching

It’s bad enough that a gun store owner declared his store a “Muslim-free zone” after the shooting and killing of four Marines and a Navy sailor by 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdelazeez. That he chose to deliver this message in front of a rebel flag tacked up over an American flag, while wearing a sidearm, made this move just that much worse.

There are so many questions raised by Andy Hallinan’s video. For starters:

  • Why didn’t Hallinan declare his gun shop a “white supremacist who says he wants to start a race war free zone” after 21-year-old Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people at a Charleston church?
  • Why didn’t Hallinan declare his gun shop a “lunatic who can’t tell reality from the movies free zone” after then-24-year-old James Holmes shot and killed 12 people and injured 70 more during a Batman movie in Aurora, Col.?
  • Why didn’t Hallinan declare his gun shop a “moody loner whose mother never should have given him guns free zone” after 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first-graders and 6 adults at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, N.J.?

I could unfortunately go on and on with this list but you get the point and let’s face it, you already know the answers.

But there’s a further irony here that the Andy Hallinans of the world miss.

Thanks to the NRA and Gun Owners of America, he can’t declare his gun store an anybody-free zone because the list of reasons you can decline to sell someone a gun in this country is so short as to be useless. The amount of information you can know about them is almost nil. And if it takes too long for even that feeble background check to go through, you have to give them the gun anyway. That’s the so-called “loophole” that allowed Mr. I Want to Start a Race War to buy his weapons. And that’s the way Andy and his ilk want it.

Hallinan is getting his 15 minutes of fame with his well-planned media assault. His reasoning makes sense to too many people. To us, it sounds like the usual elaborate justifications for racism, intolerance, and continued violence.

When a gun shop owner announces he’s closing his store because he’s tired of selling arms to young, disturbed white guys wearing rebel flags on their hats or their t-shirts, that will be a YouTube video worth watching, and a media story worth covering.

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