Take Your Gun to Work Revisited

A while back I wrote a post in this space about a couple of employees of a supermarket who were able to defend their store and their personnel because they had taken advantage of a local ordinance and had, in fact, brought their guns to work that day. It's an incedent that drew attention because of its novelty more than anything else -- it's that rare case where the weapons-carry laws worked exactly as intended, and allowed law-abiding citizens to defend themselves with a level of force that was actually appropriate to the circumstances. All too often, the right to carry a weapon simply results in the sort of accidental shootings, property damage, or inapropriate uses of force so beloved of gun control advocates. And yet, the single most difficult part of this debate does not concern either of these issues...

In Florida, the issue of bringing your gun to work has raised an entirely new controversy, as some employees of companies that prohibit weapons on the job have begun to insist on bringing their guns to work and locking the weapons in the trunk of their cars during the work day. The gun owners involved claim that since they have carry permits, and can carry a gun all the way to and from work, they should be allowed to just leave these weapons in their cars during the day, so they can be armed for the trip to and from home. The company parking lot is still private property, and the company should still be able to ban guns there, but the employees are claiming that this would require them to leave their guns at home (since they'd have no way to secure them outside of the company's property) and therefore violates their Second Amendment right to carry a gun...

Even worse, in my opinion, is the implications for people who don't drive to work. Suppose they ride the bus, or walk to work. These people have no car to secure their guns in while on the job. Should they therefore have the right to bring their guns inside and carry them in the office? And if not, aren't they also being required to leave their guns at home? More to the point, perhaps, if we don't allow these people to bring their guns to work and secure them inside the building, aren't we discriminating against those who are too poor to operate a car and those who are ecologically minded enough not to want to?

What's really disturbing about this issue, at least from where I'm sitting, is the impact on private property rights. The Second Amendment to the Constitution does not address the rights of private property owners explicitly; it merely restricts the ability of the government to control gun ownership. But if the right to bear arms supercedes the rights of property owners to prohibit people from bringing guns onto their property, then by extension gun owners should be able to bring their guns anywhere they want to (e.g. schools, churches, hospitals, crowded shopping centers, airports...). It's clearly not what the Framers had in mind when they mentioned a "Well-regulated militia," but it's just as clearly what lies at the end of this particular slippery slope...

So my question is, if you were the company's owner, if it was your office or your factory, what would you do? Would you allow people to leave their guns in their cars? If so, how would you deal with someone who is being fired being escorted out of the building by Security and right up to where they've stashed their gun? On the other hand, if you prohibit people from bringing their guns to work, and one of them is killed on the way home in a situation he could have survived if he'd had his gun with him, can you be sued for wrongful death? What about a situation like the one in my earlier post? If your employees aren't able to shoot their way out of an armed confrontation and some of them die, what happens then? Especially if state or county law would have permitted them to carry a gun anywhere other than your property?

It's worth thinking about...