You can't undo social injustice with inaction. Which is why these armed freedom fighters have taken to chain restaurants to plead nonviolently, and counterproductively, for their liberty to eat a quesadilla salad while scaring the fuck out of everybody in the joint.

The video comes from Mark Follman at Mother Jones, who's lately documented the antics of Texas Open Carry activists who think they're a bunch of nice guys who just happen to carry assault rifles around town because they can, and it's not their fault if the bitchy moms they shoot in effigy or sit next to in these restaurants feel bullied or intimidated, because freedom, goddamnit.

After a Chili's manager tells them they're welcome to eat if they leave their guns outside, the cadre kicks itself out, complaining that "This isn't the safest Chili's anymore" and resolving to eat at Sonic—where, as another video obtained by Mother Jones shows, they also get refused service.

As Follman points out, this campaign by the freedom-fightin' boomstick-bearers—who have compared their plight to blacks eating at segregated lunch counters in the Civil Rights era—has backfired for the most part, with Chipotle and others taking the Johnny Cash approach to these yahoos: Leave your guns at home, son.

And now Chili's and Sonic have effectively joined the list... from the nervous and angry reactions of some patrons to comments from some of the gun activists themselves, it's not difficult to see why these spectacles haven't been winning many people over.

When a young woman approaches the group in Chili's and expresses her dismay, a guy with an assault rifle strapped across his back offers her a flier. "Um actually, there's children here," she replies, "and you're a dumbass." As she walks away one member of the group comments mockingly, "Yes, I'm a dumbass," and then says of her, "must be Moms Demand Action," referring to the national gun-reform group...

In the Sonic video, as the thwarted gun group lingers in an adjacent parking lot, one member says: "I just wish I had my kids in there when that one dumb chick come up and started rattin' her mouth."

Speaking as a gun owner and lifelong shooter, there's absolutely no reason for these guys to do this, except that they believe they're supreme gentlemen and they believe, without evidence, that their open-carry rights are "use it or lose it." Really, what do you lose if you lose the right to eat in a family establishment with a semiautomatic AK-47 variant with a drum magazine slung across your back? Not a fucking thing. (To say nothing of the fact that most of these assault-style weapons with high-velocity rounds are dumb weapons if you actually have to shoot a perp in a restaurant at close range.)

Your guns are awesome. Shooting is awesome. Rights are awesome. So are responsibility and empathy. So let's make a deal, boys. If you want your baby back ribs:

Take Johnny's advice.