TAM, You make great points, as always, and I agree with you on the need to balance between rights of employees and private property owners.The Annoyed Man wrote:This is why the parking lot and campus carry bill carry roughly equal weight for me. Businesses are generally located on private property, or the equivalent, which is leased property which is under the business's control. Property owners have some rights in the matter too. A REASONABLE compromise is the parking lot bill, which ensures that the CHL holder will not be disarmed when they are on their own nickel, while still giving the private property holder the right to bar you from bringing a weapon inside the premises. Their reasoning may be flawed, but they have a constitutional right to their opinion in the matter, and they have a constitutional right to control their private property in the manner they see fit to do so.
Now, I don't particularly care if a CHL holder carries a gun into my house, although I would personally be more comfortable if I knew about it, but your constitutional right to carry a firearm does not override my constitutional right to control my private property in the manner I see fit. You don't pay the utilities. You don't pay the property taxes. You don't pay the mortgage. I do. Therefore, I have greater rights on my property than you do. There is a general principle that one person's rights end where they trample on another person's rights. When you're inside the premises of someone's private property, their rules prevail. If you don't like it, don't go. Nobody is forcing you to be there.
I grant guests to my home a provisional right to be there. "Provisional" means that I set the terms under which they may enter. If they are not willing to submit to those terms, then I may deny the person the right to enter, because their right to be in my home is superseded by my right to control my private property in the manner I see fit to do so. If that is not acceptable to you, then my answer is, "get lost."
Businesses operate under the same property rights as a private homeowner, but there is the additional matter of necessity. The parking lot bill creates a compromise under which the business owner may bar someone from carrying into their buildings while not creating a situation where the employee is forced to be disarmed on the way too and from work. A compromise is justifiable because, although employment is at will, it is also necessary, and it is too much to expect that a company has the right to reach into your private life and dictate how you will exercise your constitutional rights while you are not on the job. An analogy would be if the city water department would not send a worker to my house to fix their equipment because I have guns in the house.
You, as a non-employee of mine, don't need to be on my property. But you do need to be at work, so when your employer tries to keep you from securing a weapon in your car, they are reaching into your private life and forcing you to comply with their gun policy during hours which you are not on their clock. That justifies the legally imposed compromise while still preserving their constitutional right to control what happens inside their premises.
However, I would like to see a consistent standard applied in the ability of business owners to legally restrict our constitutional rights. I think that a business should have no greater ability to restrict the RKBA of their employees / customers, than they do to restrict the right to Free Speech, or protection against unreasonable search and seizure, or the guarantee of equal protection. By virtue of holding their business out as a public establishment, I personally feel that they should have less lattitude to restrict the constitutional rights of the people in that establishment than I do as the owner of my house.
I am well within my rights to kick you out of my house for saying something I don't agree with, or wearing clothing I find offensive, or being of a sex, race, or religion that I don't like. My standard for what I personally want in my house should not really need to meet any legitimacy threshold under the law. A business can also generally restrict these rights of their customers and employees. However, they rightly have much less latitude than I do as an individual homeowner who is not running a business that is open to the public. Safety of other employees and customers could be a legitimate reason to restrict these rights, and that might be a sufficient justification to bar handguns (per 30.06 signs, and other means). However, that logic would also allow a business to implement a policy barring anyone under the age of 30, or of a specific race, etc., based solely on the business owners belief that those individuals might be more likely to cause violence.
I am not saying that business owners should be forced to allow items on their premises that they don't like. However, I am very frustrated that the RKBA does not seem to get the same level of protection under the law as our other constitutionally guaranteed rights and I would like to see business's and others held to a consistent standard where they need to sufficiently justify the restriction of those rights for employees or customers that might want to use that business.