Logan coffee shop offers help to those experiencing mental health crisis
Oct 25, 2021, 6:15 PM
Photo: Adobe Stock
LOGAN, Utah — A Cache County coffee shop is offering gun owners a safe place to store their firearms while experiencing a mental health crisis.
Cache Coffee in Logan says it wants to help prevent suicide by giving people going through a hard time and needing help somewhere to store their guns. The goal is to give the gun owner time to seek help or let emotions cool before bringing the firearm back into their home.
Co-owner Mindie Buttars says they also want to ensure people can be responsible without the fear of losing their guns forever.
“A lot of times, if you are trying to find them help and they’re told ‘take them to the hospital, call 911’, they’ll end up possibly losing their firearms for life,” Buttars said.
To Buttars, this is unnecessary and cruel for people who hunt and use firearms for sport. In her mind, people just need time to work things out.
“We decided we wanted to have an option for people. That if they were going through that, they had a place to store them where they wouldn’t have to worry about losing them. However, they wouldn’t have access when they were in the middle of a crisis,” she said.
The topic of suicide is personal for Buttars, her friends, and her family. She says they lost a close friend to suicide earlier this year. They have also had to help talk people down from taking their own lives.
The coffee shop bought a gun safe through Al’s Sporting Goods with the assistance of a local Marine Corps Auxiliary Unit. The owners of Cache Coffee are also working with attorneys to navigate the legal aspect of having people sign over their guns, who are going through a mental health crisis and the process of giving them back.
“They have to show proof of identification, as well as some time of letter from some sort of mental health professional that says they are in the right frame of mind,” said Buttars.
Buttars says Cache Coffee’s gun safe currently has five firearms in it and all of them were signed over voluntarily by their owners.
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