Sometimes, there’s a new report and it’s easy to take it at face value. Especially if you’re unfamiliar about the topic. When you know a little something, though, questions arise.
It’s kind of like Gell-Mann amnesia, where you see all the errors in a news report on a topic you’re very familiar with, but then you accept other stories as the gospel truth. You forget that they screwed up on a topic you know well and don’t question whether they did it again.
I mention this because I came across a story about a gun range being fined extensively over a religious headcovering.
A gun range and shop was fined over $89,000 for allegedly denying access to their facility to two people wearing religious head coverings, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) said in a release.
Tommy Gun Inc., doing business as Targetmaster, in Chadds Ford, Deleware County, will pay $89,098.55 to the Commonwealth and to two complainants who said they were discriminated against over their head coverings.
According to the PHRC, the two complainants claimed they were denied access due to their refusal to remove their religious garbs.
“The PHRC is committed to protecting all Pennsylvanians who face discrimination,” PHRC Executive Director Chad Dion Lassiter, MSW said. “No one should be denied access to a public business because of their religious head coverings. I am proud of our team of investigators and attorneys for this work on this complaint. If you have experienced discrimination, file a complaint with one of our regional offices.”
The report doesn’t get into exactly what the head covering was or why Targetmaster said there was an issue, which raises a lot of questions.
See, there’s a difference between simply telling someone they can’t wear a yarmulke, for example, and someone saying that they don’t allow hijabs because hot brass could get caught up or something.
I mean, I don’t actually see that legitimately being the case, but we don’t know just what these religious head coverings were or what the stated reason for disallowing them was.
But there’s a serious difference between “we don’t allow those kinds of head coverings due to potentially overstated safety concerns” and “we don’t want your kind around.” While the fine and this report suggest it was the latter, we honestly don’t know, and that’s a problem. A big one.
There’s no place for racism, sexism, or any form of bigotry in the gun community. People of all walks of life have the right to keep and bear arms and they should be encouraged to exercise it. Yet we don’t know that any bigotry was involved here, and that bothers me.
Especially considering the media’s hostility toward gun owners, gun ranges, gun dealers, etc.
And while Pennsylvania has some pro-gun measures on the books, like preemption, the state has been leaning anti-gun for quite some time, so it’s not difficult to imagine that legitimate safety concerns or some other legitimate reason for disallowing certain head coverings, religious or not, were well-intentioned and really didn’t have anything to do with bigotry of any kind.
The problem is that absent any information, this range is now being thought of as being run by hating haters who hate.
Read the full article here
