Folks...if we don't all stand up to these self serving businesses they will continue to deny us our rights.
Interesting statement. Believe it or not, for profit businesses are in fact self serving. That is why they exist, regardless of whether they allow you to carry or not.
As for your rights, they have rights to. Strangely, theaters also squelch your 1st amendment right, but I noticed that you apparently are okay with giving up that right.
Simply put, carrying a gun into a business as a patron isn't your right. It isn't your right by the plain fact that you can only do it legally if it is allowed by the business. So it is a privilege regardless of whether you think it should be your right to do so or not. Until laws change, that is the way it is.
Please note that not only will I, my family and friends no longer do business with you, but as an individual and as a member of several of the largest firearm forums on the internet, I will both publicize your response and support a boycott of your businesses.
Efforts to force businesses to make them comply with our carry needs through threats, protests, and boycotts, from what I have read on this forum and others, have all failed, IIRC. These are all very negative attacks on the business and businesses generally all respond defensively to such insults. Since they don't want you in with your gun, they are happy to not have you in their business. That you are boycotting doesn't bother them. In fact, it helps them with their desire that you not carry in their business.
The efforts to get business to let people carry in them that have been successful seem to be those efforts that don't try to punish businesses for not complying, but instead are those efforts that attempt to persuade in a logical manner the reasons why it is in fact beneficial for a business to allow law abiding citizens to carry.
Obviously, this is the much harder way to try to make a business change because it requires quite a bit of maturity, eloquence, business logic, and humbleness, not to mention being personable and having the gift of persuasion. Being combative, argumentative, or expressing a sense of entitlement when going into a business personally, verbally, or with written communication isn't likely to result in a beneficial outcome. This just reinforces the business' perspective that it doesn't want people like you as patrons.
That you are now engaging in your punitive action by publicizing the horrors of Regal theaters will undoubtedly help you to feel empowered and feel better about your decision, but Regal hasn't a clue about these "largest firearm forums on the internet" and isn't likely to notice any actual effect outside of the normal business variation they experience from day to day or cycle to cycle. They know this.
You don't change peoples' minds by trying to force them to see things your way. If you haven't noticed, their policy hasn't forced you to see things their way so why would you think your policy will force them to see things your way?
