Mother Nature Network<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz has an opinion on many hot topics, including gay marriage, but Schulz has avoided taking sides in the national gun debate, until now. Schulz\u2019s non-stance on the issue was praised by pro-gun activists, who staged a Starbucks \u2018Guns and Coffee\u2019 appreciation day in August. The activists\u2019 decision to use Starbucks as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":665,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_post_series":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-8301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-starbucks","entry","no-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/665"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8301"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.covalence.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=8301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"CEO](\"http:\/\/www.ethicalquote.com\/newTemplate\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/130918_s.jpg\" "\\"CEO")
<\/a>Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz has an opinion on many hot topics, including gay marriage, but Schulz has avoided taking sides in the national gun debate, until now. Schulz\u2019s non-stance on the issue was praised by pro-gun activists, who staged a Starbucks \u2018Guns and Coffee\u2019 appreciation day in August. The activists\u2019 decision to use Starbucks as a political tool thrust the coffeehouse into the national spotlight and the plan seems to have backfired because now Schulz is asking customers to keep their firearms out of U.S.-based Starbucks stores. In an open letter posted on the Starbucks website, Schulz said, \u201cOur company\u2019s longstanding approach to \u201copen carry\u201d has been to follow local laws: we permit it in states where allowed and we prohibit it in states where these laws don\u2019t exist. We have chosen this approach because we believe our store partners should not be put in the uncomfortable position of requiring customers to disarm or leave our stores. We believe that gun policy should be addressed by government and law enforcement\u2013not by Starbucks and our store partners. Recently, however, we\u2019ve seen the \u201copen carry\u201d debate become increasingly uncivil and, in some cases, even threatening. Pro-gun activists have used our stores as a political stage for media events misleadingly called \u201cStarbucks Appreciation Days\u201d that disingenuously portray Starbucks as a champion of \u201copen carry.\u201d To be clear: we do not want these events in our stores. Some anti-gun activists have also played a role in ratcheting up the rhetoric and friction, including soliciting and confronting our customers and partners. More…<\/a><\/p>\n