Chip Bergh, President and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co, had the following to post after an idiot customer discharged his firearm in the store "by accident" and injured someone (who is not clear from the letter):

An Open Letter to Customers: Our Weapons Policy

President and CEO, Levi Strauss & Co
Dear Customers,

The debate in the U.S. over gun safety and gun rights is as complex as it is divisive. As a former army officer, a father and business leader, I’ve heard the arguments from all sides. And, as CEO of a 163-year-old company whose products and presence rest at the intersection of culture and community in more than 110 countries around the world, I feel a tremendous responsibility to share our position on the issue, now, at a time when clarity is paramount.

Providing a safe environment to work and shop is a top priority for us at Levi Strauss & Co. That imperative is quickly challenged, however, when a weapon is carried into one of our stores. Recently, we had an incident in one of our stores where a gun inadvertently went off, injuring the customer who was carrying it.

So, while we understand the heartfelt and strongly-held opinions on both sides of the gun debate, it is with the safety and security of our employees and customers in mind that we respectfully ask people not to bring firearms into our stores, offices or facilities, even in states where it’s permitted by law. Of course, authorized members of law enforcement are an exception.

With stores in Paris, Nice and Orlando, and the company’s European headquarters in Brussels, I’ve thought more about safety in the past year than in the previous three decades of my career because of how ‘close to home’ so many incidents with guns have come to impacting people working for this company.

We operate in hundreds of stores across every state in the U.S., and laws are different in each one. We know that the presence of firearms in our stores creates an unsettling environment for many of our employees and customers. We also know that trying to enforce a ban could potentially undermine the purpose of the ban itself: safety. With that in mind we’ve made this decision as a business – a request not a mandate – and we sincerely hope responsible gun owners will respect our position.

It boils down to this: you shouldn’t have to be concerned about your safety while shopping for clothes or trying on a pair of jeans. Simply put, firearms don't belong in either of those settings. In the end, I believe we have an obligation to our employees and customers to ensure a safe environment and keeping firearms out of our stores and offices will get us one step closer to achieving that reality.

Sincerely,

Chip Bergh

President and Chief Executive Officer, Levi Strauss & Co.

The usual disclaimers apply. He has the right to say what he wants, and I fully endorse his right to choose who he wishes to do business with.

That out of the way....

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Levis was a brand synonymous with pioneering and the wilderness, but now it's about fashion, and with that fashion come fashionable ideas about the world.

I won't even ask if they'd tell citizens of any particular demographic with an outsized crime rate that, given various rampages over the last years, are almost guaranteed to have assaulted someone in a Levi's store or in the vicinity of one. That would be to acknowledge hatefacts, and we can't post a copy of Colin Flaherty's "White Girl Bleed a Lot" or "Don't Make The Black Kids Angry".

No - it's using this incident not as an excuse to ban or restrain an idiot customer, but to pre-emptively ban an entire class of law-abiding citizens. And like all those Taleb labels "Intellectual yet Idiot" he gets "the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects".

This blindness is why the argument Bastiat makes, of the seen vs the unseen, completely bypasses them. It likely is related to why they literally cannot consider any negative effects from gay marriage, nevermind ones big enough in the confluence of that, pushing careers for women vice homemaking, etc. to undo civilization (hint: the future belongs to those who show up).

Yes, by not having guns in stores, fewer people may get shot in stores, though I'm sure a few thugs and predators will be happy to know they have carte blanche. It's not clear the stores will actually be safer though. Certainly, they make an exception for law enforcement, as if police cannot also be thugs, and out of total ignorance that private concealed carriers likely shoot and use their firearms more than most cops.

It's almost surreal that he actually claims to have thought about Nice, Paris, and Orlando, for it's not like those firearms, or those in San Bernandino, were lawfully employed, and Nice involved a truck.

One can certainly detect the scent of "no one needs to carry a gun" - and the comments - which also include a few pro-gun idiots - bear that out in spades, with phallic compensation and a desire to punch out anyone carrying simply for doing so starring prominently.

So - Levi as a company has nicely requested that customers not bring their icky firearms because they're not appropriate, they believe, for buying clothes.

And I'm figuring that Wrangler, among other brands, works well enough.

UPDATE: It's also interesting to look at Chicago - 700 homicides this year and counting despite intensive gun control, and wonder if Levi's wants their stores "safer" in the same way.

Safety Third

During the relatively short - lived show "Rocket City Rednecks" - Travis Taylor explained why their philosophy was "safety third". To wit, if safety is your first concern, they you won't do anything fun, and second, that the expression "safety first" is so overused that people simply filter it out.

In those lines, it's worth also watching Mike Rowe at one of the few TED talks worth a damn - especially where he relates being on an Alaskan crab boat in a storm.

But what brings me here today is stumbling into one of my favorite scenes from the late Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather" - illustrated (side note, the BBC version is worth watching). The man was observant of people, had a writing style that has been imitated but rarely equaled, and was intellectually honest enough to change his mind on things (Eric Raymond has a story about how he took Terry shooting... and Pratchett enjoyed it ), or at least admit he didn't have all the information.

The panel speaks for itself.

Karma

Man, I absolutely love the little stick toy the dudes playing with, got one set at a ren faire, but that's not why I'm posting this shot.

That said, I brought you this lovely image because it looks like the god KEK has a sense of humor. Or Eris. They can fight over it, I'll stay out of the way.

Just look at the sign being held up on the hood, and the full glory of their attitude towards that which got them there in the first place.

Crony Capitalism

While I often disagree to one degree or another with various articles over at Slate Star Codex, they at least are in search of the truth, and the latest, in a response to an article over at vox.com, is a very good explanation of both why "crony" capitalism is bad, and why calls to further regulate, say, pharmaceuticals, are disingenuous.

Let me ask Vox a question: when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?

The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.

If a chair company decided to charge $300 for their chairs, somebody else would set up a woodshop, sell their chairs for $250, and make a killing – and so on until chairs cost normal-chair-prices again. When Mylan decided to sell EpiPens for $300, in any normal system somebody would have made their own EpiPens and sold them for less. It wouldn’t have been hard. Its active ingredient, epinephrine, is off-patent, was being synthesized as early as 1906, and costs about ten cents per EpiPen-load.

There's more at the link, and it's all spot on.