"No Citizenship, No Service"

I have been out of the blogosphere for a while due to certain circumstances: My dog got pretty ill and required some babying. She's doing much better now.

Also, I have an upcoming medical procedure this Thursday which requires a few trips back to the doctor's office. Don't worry though, it's nothing serious, and I'm too mean to get ill, anyway.

I mean to get back to regular reading, and I just couldn't let this awesome story go. I will reproduce it here for accessibility, from this source:

Store requires citizenship to buy ammo

By Allison Williams Correspondent

ST. PAULS — A bright red sign hangs in Nick Scavo’s store, right next to the World War II poster of Gen. Douglas MacArthur chomping on his pipe. “You must be a U.S. citizen to buy ammo or clips,” it says. No citizenship, no service. Scavo runs a military surplus store on Broad Street, the main drag of this town halfway between Fayetteville and Lumberton. It’s stuffed with camouflage of all sizes, infants to adults, boxes of mess kits and canteens, men’s dress shoes, even an ancient slot machine. He somehow found room to park a Vietnam-era jeep, just like the one he drove when he fought in the Marines. And this is just the half of it — Scavo says there’s more at home — but he admits that he has yet to find a place for the used full-size fire engine he just bought.

Space is one reason he moved his business from Fayetteville to St. Pauls. He liked the small town.

But then he began to notice an influx of Hispanic immigrants. In 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau reported 704 Hispanics in Robeson County. That number jumped to 5,994 in 2000. Many of them found work in the fields or in nearby plants — Smithfield Packing Co. in Tar Heel, Mountaire Farms in Lumber Bridge and Prestage Foods in St. Pauls. They began to open small grocery stores, restaurants, even a religious bookstore off Broad Street.

And some of them came into Scavo’s store looking for ammunition.

That bothered Scavo — he didn’t want to help people who were here illegally. The way he sees it, by refusing to put ammunition in the hands of lawbreakers, he’s preventing crime. North Carolina law requires proof of age to buy ammunition — 18 for shotgun shells and 21 for other kinds of ammunition — but it does not require proof of citizenship.

“It’s my store,” he says. “I’m going to run it the way I want.”

So he put up the sign, in English and Spanish, something for which he had to ask help from a Hispanic woman. In Spanish, the sign says, “Effectivo a partir de ahora para poder tu obtener las balas y cargadores nese citas tener tu estados unidas ciudadania. Gracias.”

“I probably said what everybody who lives here thinks,” he said.

Mayor Gordon “Buddy” Westbrook says he has not seen the sign or heard any complaints. “If I were someone from another country and saw something like that facing me, I might have some feelings about it,” he said. “Then again, he may have good reason for it."

When a visitor points out that the sign may not be the friendliest message in a place that proclaims itself the “Little Town with the Big Heart,” Scavo just shrugs. But when it’s pointed out that other businesses — department stores, for example — do not require proof of citizenship to buy a shirt, he fires back, “You’re not going to kill anybody with that shirt, now, are you?’’

Scavo has a theory or statistic for almost every question. He dislikes illegal immigrants, but when asked who would fill the jobs that many immigrants accept, he says that problem is easily solved.

Abortion, he says, has robbed the United States of 50 million people who would otherwise fill the workplace.

Therefore, by outlawing abortion, the problem would be solved.

Hispanics in town don’t seem that worried about Scavo’s policy. They say he’s the exception and not the norm in St. Pauls, a town that has welcomed immigrants. On a recent afternoon, Libna Velasquez worked the front counter at El Maguey, a small store on Broad Street that sells a variety of things, including popular movies and ice cream. “He has rules on who you can sell to and not sell to,” she said in Spanish. “He should not make that decision on his own.

“If it’s only illegals, it’s assuming they’re delinquents just because they’re not documented. Sometimes American citizens are the ones breaking the law.”

At La Roca Mexican store, Angel Cervantes helped customers who navigated the tight aisles packed with food and drinks. He wore a sparkly T-shirt with the word “Hustla” printed on the front. He said everyone — citizens and noncitizens — should have the same protection. “We have the right to defend ourselves,’’ he said.

There might be one thing that people on both sides of this issue can agree on: the need for a concrete policy from Congress on immigration. Marisol Jimenez McGee is advocacy director for El Pueblo, a public policy organization in Raleigh that is dedicated to strengthening the Latino community.

“This question of citizenship is just another example of people’s frustration with our broken immigration system,” she said. “They’re trying to take it into their own hands.

“And when people take this into their hands, we’re going to see more examples like this, potentially even more discriminatory or dangerous kinds of action. None of us think the status quo is healthy or sustainable.”

Kudos to Mr. Scavo... But the rest of these fools are mind-numbingly predictable. Imagine for a moment what a anti-gun nut leftard would do if a bullet pulled from a body were traced back to him selling to a criminal illegal. The flurry of anti-Second Amendment legislation would be dizzying!