Turns Out There's More to That Waffle House Armed Customer Story Than We Thought

Remember the story from earlier this week about the Waffle House in Kentucky that refused to serve an armed, uniformed soldier? Turns out that if a Facebook post from the owner is accurate, they were pretty well-justified in doing so.

If you missed the story, officer Billy Welch of the Army National Guard was in a Jessamine County, Kentucky Waffle House. He had sat down and ordered his food when a server informed him he’d need to please leave his holstered gun (which they apparently had not noticed prior to this) outside the restaurant premises to continue receiving service. Welch declined and left the Waffle House without interest, but a nearby patron took exception to this, posted about it on Facebook, and the whole thing went viral.

Predictably, conservatives went apeshit, talking about how Welch had been “disrespected.” One dumb motherfucker even called the employees “bigoted,” because sure, that’s totally what that word means. The restaurant’s response at the time had been to say that they had a “no firearms” policy—a policy shared by Waffle House as a company.* That’s a perfectly reasonable policy, and by itself that should’ve been a perfectly reasonable explanation. To sane human beings, anyway.

According to Eater’s Whitney Filloon, however, there’s more to it than that. In a since-removed Facebook post, the Waffle House franchise’s owner, Ray Daniels, made it clear that there were some facts the local news left out of their initial report:

However, on this particular incident, two facts have not been reported accurately that facilitated the situation with Mr. Welch. First, he was an active participant in a fight on the premises several weeks prior to September 27th. He was restrained and taken off the premises by off-duty police officers that were eating in the restaurant at the time. The second item not reported accurately was the time the most recent incident occurred, 2AM. We have associates who have to make snap decisions on our third shifts to provide for their own safety and the safety of our customers. Our associates decided because of Mr. Welch’s recent altercation, which they witnessed, it was in their best interest at 2 AM to ask Mr. Welch to leave his firearm in his vehicle.

Assuming this is accurate (and there’s some doubt as to that, since the post was taken down, although the reason for why is unclear), what we have here is a specific individual who has shown—on the premises of this particular Waffle House, no less—violent tendencies. The restaurant’s employees decided they didn’t feel comfortable with someone known to be violent also having a gun while inside their eatery. Only in the fever-dreams of people who begin masturbating every time Wayne LaPierre steps up to a podium could that sound unreasonable.

But, y’know. Keep on beating that drum, conservatives.

* Law-enforcement officers are typically exempted from this policy, although I struggle to understand the argument that members of the Army National Guard count as “law-enforcement officers.”