Grace-less
If you personally hate one particular legal semi-automatic rifle, you won’t be getting any of the $26 fried chicken with prunes and shallots at Anne Verrill’s Grace restaurant in Portland, Maine.
“If you own this gun,” she wrote on Facebook of an AR-15 rifle, which she mistakenly believed was the gun used to kill 49 people in a June terrorist attack in Orlando, Fla., “or you condone the ownership of this gun for private use, you may no longer enter either of my restaurants, because the only thing I want to teach my children is love.”
Maine is an open-carry state, but Verrill has a right to make decisions about whether to allow guns on her property. But the thought-police aspect of her comment may be a little over the top.
The restaurateur got a lot of blowback about her post, took it down, then spoke to The New York Times about it. She told The Times she wished she had worded her original post differently because her comment about patrons condoning the use of the gun was a distraction, but she rejected any comparison to a baker who doesn’t want to bake a cake for a gay couple because it violated the baker’s religious beliefs.