CONNECTING THE DOTS!!!!
A few years ago, Michele Mueller arrived at a Kroger supermarket in downtown Cincinnati, 330,000 signatures in hand, asking the store to stop allowing customers to openly carry guns as they shopped.
Mueller, a volunteer for Moms Demand Action, a gun violence prevention organization, wanted to deliver the petitions to the manager. But she was stopped by someone from corporate, she said. He wouldn’t let her into the store, but he did accept her petitions.
“I said to him, ‘I’m having a hard time understanding that you will not allow us to deliver a stack of paper through that front door, but you would allow an AR-15 slung over someone’s shoulder,’” Mueller recalled. “He didn’t say anything. And I knew that we had an awful lot of work left to do.”
Five years later, her efforts have finally paid off.
Last week, Kroger, the country’s largest supermarket chain, announced that it would ask customers to stop openly carrying guns in its stores. Its announcement came on the heels of a similar decision by Walmart after a deadly mass shooting at one of its stores in El Paso on Aug. 3.
The two major store chains opened a floodgate, and in the days since, Walgreens, CVS, Wegmans, Aldi, Meijer and Publix and others have said they will ask customers not to openly carry guns. The change signals a seismic shift in corporate willingness to engage in the gun debate.
While this pivot comes after a spate of mass shootings, the foundation was laid by activists across the country like Mueller, who’ve spent years applying pressure to stores. Behind the scenes, an army of women has been boycotting shops and signing petitions. The message was loud and clear: They want safety while shopping with their families.
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