"There are going to be armed people in bars. The good news for you is that people who are concerned about the law are now allowed to be among them."

(Thanks to @Serataru for helping me come up with this formulation.)

A Richmond bartender and writer posted an angry, profanity-laden, violence-threatening rant to Blogger yesterday, directed at any of his own customers who might be lawfully carrying a concealed handgun. Jack Lauterback, a local booze-slinger who writes a column for Style Weekly, begins his blog tirade with "80 fucking stupid assholes met at O'Charleys Bar in Richmond today to celebrate the fact that they can bring a hidden gun into a bar."

It pretty much goes downhill from there. Between stereotyping typical CHP holders as "redneck idiots who are extremely overweight" and sporadically employed unskilled workers, he takes several opportunities to suggest that we're idiots, morons and otherwise mentally and morally impaired, plus a bunch of "pussies", and then threatens physical harm against any who dare to step inside any bar he's working. Lauterback writes:

If you attempt to walk into my bar with a concealed weapon and for whatever reason you didn't conceal it enough.... You won't have enough time to draw your piece cowboy. Your face will already be on the pavement. I promise.

When I tweeted that he had threatened to murder people who are obeying the law, he replied that he only intends to "maim" them.

Style Weekly runs a "scorecard" where its editors rate the city's "zeitgeist" over the last seven days. In this week's issue, Richmond scores a sad "-7", due in part to a deep negative rating (also "-7") for the new restaurant carry law. The paper disdains:

Concealed-weapons permit-holders celebrate their new McDonnell-given right to carry guns into bars as long as they don’t drink alcohol. We’re not worried, ’cause you can smell these gun-toting crazies a mile away: When you get a whiff of deer-urine-soaked camouflage mixed with PBR breath and the desperate scent of loneliness — run.

It seems a bit forced and silly, with the juvenile name-calling and all that. It's also internally inconsistent: they're "not worried" but you should run anyway? And does anyone associate Pabst Blue Ribbon with hunters? It seems to be the beverage of choice for RVA's young urbanites, who are interested in a whole different variety of gauges than your typical stalker of ungulates.

Style Weekly employs Jack Lauterback, journeyman in the dissipative arts, as a weekly columnist. Last week Lauterback threatened violence against anyone who dared enter "his" bar while carrying concealed, and the editor-in-chief of Style Weekly chimed in on his behalf both here and on Twitter. I anticipate that this week's volley is some sort of last-moments-before-deadline heel-nipping, preceding a grander expose in a later, TBD issue.