OP wrote a rant based on living with 50% of the people around him on drugs. Sees similar behavior at a gun store, goes to the internet, and the resulting discussion solves nothing other than to air prejudices.
How people act in retail stores and the store clerk's decision to sell them something are two different things. You can't stop people being rude and arrogant - I will say it again, IT'S NORMAL. HAPPENS ALL THE TIME NOW IN PUBLIC SOCIETY.
Whether anyone around them likes it or not, tough. They don't care. They are insensitive to someone picking up cues that might or might not lead to assessments of character or a lack of it. Brusque, rude, and even belligerent behavior is NORMAL now and the #1 reason why it's getting harder to keep retail help.
Ask me how I know. The common denominator is that the individual who does this is usually a person with a high degree of unfamiliarity - outright ignorance - about the subject that store deals in. They go overboard to display an image of being competent when in fact they are only giving cues about what little they do know.
I will say that happens a lot on the internet, too.
How somebody acts or looks these days is a matter of diversity - people dress and act as they please, with NO regard for how I, or you, or anyone else likes it. There is no common denominator that says we are all in this together any more. We live in a society of fragmented niches which make no effort to relate to each other.
Try discussing what kind of dress people should wear going to church near the beach sometime. Exciting exchange of views. No level playing field there.
What I am reading about comments saying someone looks like they just crawled out of a basement to appear in public might well apply to those who apparently have never seen the general public or interacted with them. I can only conclude that someone is living an equally sheltered life absent contact with the general public and certainly not on a daily basis.
Work retail and you learn you haven't seen it all, yet. There's always something new. From the wide variety of different nationalities, accents, and ethnic groups to every flavor of lifestyle you may not have wanted to discover, demonstrated in public. Some act out their new found identity to ensure you, the retail clerk, are made aware of their proclivity.
Some loud guy and his son buying a firearm is tame in comparison. And going to the internet to stir up some kind of agreement is, too. Unfortunately, being a public forum and consisting of a large variety of different viewpoints, getting substantiation for an opinion isn't a guarantee.
Insisting on it won't happen either.
We can agree to disagree about the substance of what happened, vs what was presented as an opinion on it, and that's about it. Other than that I suspect the mods are spring loaded to close this as very little positive benefit is presented in the opening thread. It's just a rant about how somebody perceived human behavior.
I suggested that it meant very little compared to the fact they drove a car to get there. Think about that the next time out on the roads of America and how we still tend to successfully interact to get to all our destinations. Even as different as we are.