This Starbucks is busy with pre-school and pre-work traffic. There are easily twenty people waiting for their orders.

A scrawny guy in a white, sleeveless T walks in. His left shoulder is tattooed with a pattern. He’s no more than 5’9 and 140. The handgun holstered looks big against his slim waist. He’s a bit twitchy and asks about his food order.

After a minute, I watch him leave, heading to an older compact car. One I noticed had a woman waiting in the passenger seat. The car I suspected was his.

And the question I always think comes again:

What did he think would happen here?

I know what he’s prepared for. Just in case. Damn the chances. Or the actual experiences. Or that if he ever “needed” to use it, he’d be arrested.

None of this answers the real question.

He’s operating by a certain set of rules. About self-defense, perhaps. And character as performance art.

What do we think happens here?

The rest of us are at a coffee shop. To get coffee. A group is chatting. Some of us are writing on laptops. Most are just on our way to work.

Our rules? Waiting our turn. Making a transaction and expecting it will be fulfilled. Trying to make someone’s job easier through kindness and patience.

Most of us will walk out the door and go the right way out of the parking lot, then the street. We’ll try to have a good day and try to help other people have the same.

Perspective

We often treat this as a difference of perspective. Or else we make it a bedrock difference. But it is something far more maleable than that.

We’re all living by rules. Some are the ones we all agree to and some are the ones we choose to follow as individuals. And then there a few rules that some want to impose on others.

I don’t suspect the scrawny guy with the gun and I have much in common beyond the obvious: white, male, at a Starbucks in Terre Haute, Indiana. But we do live in a society with rules we all actually do live by.

And it isn’t enough to say that some of the (unwritten) rules he lives by are rules I don’t want to live by. As if it is just what he wants against what I want.

Abiding by different sets of rules at once is dangerous.

Because we don’t actually know what to do. It is why I find yield signs at traffic lights annoying. They complicate the rules.

This is also why police don’t like so many citizens armed. It makes it harder to figure out the bad guys from the good guys when everybody has guns. And harder, too, when Jesus tells us to melt down guns into farm tools.

It is hard to trust that a person is following the letter of the law when you know he intends to violate the spirit of it. Precisely because they are offering a competing set of rules.

When the court says it is taking a plain reading of the law (being a textualist) without regard to outcomes, it is abiding by its own unwritten law: that laws aren’t responsible for outcomes. Like 2 can be added to 2 without regard to the four on the other side of the equation.

It isn’t just about the rules we live by. Like you and I can live by a random assortment of rules.

It is the rules that we all come to live by, together. And who we entrust to define (or redefine) them.