Remember my blog post a few weeks ago about the Brady Campaign collecting signatures to push Starbucks into banning guns in its shops? The campaign has gained national attention with recent stories by the Associated Press, ABC News and Gawker (including a photo of a rifleshotgun-toting customer inside a Starbucks), and it comes to Seattle on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. for a press conference near Pike Place Market, site of the first Starbucks store (and the one Starbucks calls its first).

Why Starbucks and not McDonald's or Burger King or Caribou Coffee or any other chain you might name? "The Open Carry activists chose Starbucks. We didn't," said Doug Pennington, spokesman for the Brady Campaign.

OpenCarry.org describes itself as "a pro-gun Internet community focused on the right to openly carry properly holstered handguns in daily American life." They sometimes meet in public places to exercise their right to carry unconcealed guns.

The Brady Campaign has gone to several chains where Open Carry meets to ask management to ban guns in their stores. Peet's Coffee & Tea, Buckhorn Grill and California Pizza Kitchen have banned either guns or concealed guns, but Starbucks has not.

Thus the public petition, which now has 28,000 signatures, up from 15,000 a few weeks ago. Brady activists will deliver the signatures to Starbucks' headquarters Wednesday after the press conference. It will also hand out forms here and in other cities for interested customers to fill out and give store managers.

Update 2:45 p.m.: Enough people have e-mailed that I'm going to point out what the Gawker photo says if you click on it. Uploaded in 2006, it's someone in the Navy in Kuwait, where according to its cutline, weapons were required off base. There was apparently a saying, "Grab your guns, we're going to Starbucks."