Uniformed Police Officers Asked To Leave Restaurant For Carrying Firearms

If this Cheesecake Factory is anything like the ones I’ve been to, I have to ask – how could people see the officers’ guns? (Seriously – going to those restaurants is like walking into a cave. Their lighting is terrible).

According to this, a group of police officers in Tacoma, Washington, were asked to leave the Cheesecake Factory – not because they were police officers (that makes for a welcome change of pace), but because they were carrying guns. And Cheesecake Factory apparently doesn’t allow customers to carry firearms for ANY reason –

“They had seated us in the back area,” Miriam Nichols, who’s worked three years for the department of corrections, told KIRO-FM. “Shortly after the rest of our party arrived, we were asked to leave because we were carrying our firearms with us. They said they did not allow firearms in their establishment.”

The officers showed their badges and law enforcement IDs to restaurant’s managers. They explained why they were armed — but no dice.

“They said it didn’t matter, and they asked us to leave,” Nichols told KIRO. “We left quietly and tried not to make more of a scene than it already was.”

Cheesecake Factory staffers were polite about the whole thing, she added to the station: “There are only so many ways to politely kick someone out of an establishment, though.”

“I was a little floored that it was even happening,” Nichols added to KIRO. “This wasn’t the first place that my colleagues and I have gone to lunch … having contact with clients, offenders, the general public, while on duty. This is the first time we had this reaction.”

Nichols also posted about the situation on her Facebook page and it went viral –

Cheesecake Factory’s corporate arm did issue an apology, saying that it is their policy to allow uniformed police officers to carry firearms in their restaurants and the manager in Tacoma must have misunderstood the rules. Okay, fine. Corporate cleared that up and I’m glad that they did.

But for the love of all that is good and decent – how stupid do you have to be to not realize that police officers on duty FREAKING CARRY GUNS??? It was one of the first things I learned about police officers back in preschool. They’re trained to handle weapons, they use them to protect themselves and others from bad guys, and it’s nothing to be scared of (granted, I’d already been around a fair number of guns at home at this point, so I wasn’t nervous about it. But my point stands).

If I’m out in public and there’s an armed police officer nearby, then I’m probably safer than if there wasn’t an armed police officer. I’ll never understand leftists who look at a gun and start freaking out like a snake tried to bite them and barely missed. And, quite frankly, I’m tired of trying to explain it to them.

If you can’t figure out that an inanimate object isn’t going to spontaneously hurt you, then there’s nothing I can do about that.