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Topic: POLL QUESTION
Should Guns Be Permitted on Company Parking Lots?
September 4, 2009
As Barb reports, new laws are springing up all over the United States restricting how employers deal with employees who bring firearms onto company parking lots.
What do you think? Should employers be allowed to ban employees from storing firearms in their vehicles on company parking lots, whether lawfully stored or not? Take a moment to answer the poll question on the home page of SafetyXChange.org.
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What is the leading cause of workplace fatalities in the US? I think shootings is up there close to the top.
A few years ago while working for another company, I had to visit a site in Kitchener, Ontario where you had to pass through a security gate (manned by an outside agency) to gain access to the plant. The plant was large, and there were video cameras installed to cover the parking lot, outdoor areas of the plant, etc. Just before I arrived, two workers arrived for work directly from a hunting trip and had their rifles mounted on a gun rack in the back window of their pickup truck. The security personnel were perturbed as they had no backgrond as to why guns had been brought to work by these empoyees. Gun laws are much strickter that in the USA and this open display of firearms is never seen. In the end, after a lot of discussion, the workers were allowed to complete their shift, but without their guns being brought to work in the future. Not only did the incident frighten a lot of co-workers, the guns might have been taken during their shift and fallen into possesion of criminals. At the very least, guns should be out of view.
The poll is logically flawed, presenting a false delimma, and a Non Sequitur. The 'Yes' answer presumes a link between the presence of a firearm concealed in a personal vehicle, and "the threat of violence". What is the basis for that presumption; because it certainly isn't any statistical data.
Completely aside from the Second Amendment issue, the presumption that there is some link connecting the presence of a firearm with an increased risk of violence is simply false. The actual evidence supports the quote that Sam Colt may not have made all men equal, but he certainly made them gentlemen.
Hank is correct. The presence of a firearm does not link to increased violence. I have worked in a rural environment where hunters brought firearms to work and there was never a threat of violence. The company provided a storage place for the firearms.
Greg:
"I think shootings is up there close to the top." No, Sir. For a couple of years, the number one cause of workplace fatalities was workplace VIOLENCE, not shootings. Most workplace violence does not involve a firearm, particularly employee/employee violence.
Aside from that, those who committed the violence (firearms or not) were already demonstrating a complete disregard of any law: additional laws restricting firearms in parking lots would have no effect. In fact, in those years, the kind of laws described in these articles were not in existence and many employers DID prohibit firearms in parking lots.
Guns were created to take lives, plain and simple. Why would any employee need to take a life at the workplace? In self defense you say? Against what? Answer: another firearm....and the vicous cycle continues. The theory, or "massaged" statistic that implies that guns do not increase workplace violence is flawed in that it is an incomplete assessment of risk. Incomplete in that it only looks at frequency. We all know that in safety frequency is only one piece of the puzzle. The glaringly obvious factor that is convenietly avoided in the statistic is severity. Without guns in the workplace, violent incidents can be severe enough. Now lets introduce firearm availability in only 25% of those incidents last year, and you can easily see how drastically worse a violent incident can go terribly wrong. It's an unnecessary risk that employers are still liable for, and obligated to mitigate, yet they are stripped of the power to handle it effectively.
James:
First, your logic in the initial statements is flawed. Firearms are indeed weapons. What is the justification for the leap from having a firearm locked and out of sight in your vehicle to using it in the workplace? There is NO data supporting such a jump. The data is quite clear: there is absolutely NO support for the claim that the presence of firearms increases the incidence of violence in the workplace - in fact, the data supports just the opposite.
Second, this isn't about guns IN the workplace. Read the laws. It is about having the right to keep a firearm in your personal vehicle, where it is available to you before you arrive and after you leave the workplace. I know of no single incident where an employee went to his vehicle to obtain a legally stored firearm, then returned to the worklace to use it in an act of violence. Can you cite a single incident?
Third, most of the firearms-related incidents IN the workplace (in the US) fall into two categories: attacks in retail (that is, robberies) and unprovoked attacks at educational facilities. This of course discounts law-enforcement shootings. The data clearly shows that in the two major categories, most of the shooters that are stopped (that is, those that do not escape after shooting) are stopped BY ARMED EMPLOYEES. More than half of those do NOT involve the employee actually SHOOTING their aggressor: the mere display is sufficient to apprehend the criminal.
Fourth, your presumption of increased severity is based on the unwarranted presumption that firearms in vehicles will ipso facto be introduced into the workplace, and used in violent acts. Historically this is a false presumption: the historical data simply does not support the claim.
Fifth, employers are NOT stripped by these laws of the power to prevent bringing firearms INTO the workplace: that has not changed.
Finally, your first statements fail to take into account a factor that is unavoidable, as pertains to the defensive use of firearms. The person who uses a firearm defensively (regardless of location) has not decided to kill someone. The decision that someone will die has already been made: the defender is left with only the choice of who. Having been in that situation, I understand the distinction. However, that is a different subject...
James Noviss.
At the plant I worked at for 18 years, there was also a serial killer working there, Derrick Todd Lee. He never used a gun to kill, yet there he was parking along other folks, other women that due to ignorant mindsets such as you had no way to defend themselves.
On 2 different occasions on campuses here in the US, private gun owners were able to produce their lawfully owned firearms and stop a killer from killing more. In every instance where no one else had a gun, a lot more people died. So your asinine assumption that "Guns were created to take lives, plain and simple" is just plain ignorant. My guns have saved several lives, as a police officer, and as a private citizen, yet they have never taken a life. Employers have huge signs in their lots that say they are not responsible for theft, loss, damage, etc. If they refuse to take responsibility for the safety of our lives and possessions, at least have the decency to allow us to be responsible for it.
This is pretty interesting http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55288
While the discussion here is clearly one of both passion and importance -and one I'd love to pursue- is has wandered pretty far from the original topic of simply allowing workers to have firearms secured in their personal vehicles.
The question is not "does the worker have the right to bring a firearm into the workplace"; nor is it "does the presence of firearms result in violence"; nor even "do firearms possess inherent moral value (are they evil)". The issue is simply whether a US citizen (we ARE talking about US laws) have the right to retain a legal object inside a locked vehicle parked at an employer site.
I grew up with guns in the house. Guys took guns to school to work on in shop class. During hunting season, it was nothing to see a person walking down the street carrying a rifle. My mother once came walking across the front lawn carrying a rifle as my new boyfriend pulled in the driveway (she was going to sight it in for hunting season). We alway got the first day of buck season and the first day of doe season off school and businesses were closed. We were taught to respect guns. My workplace takes customers trap shooting during visits to the area.
We have not had a single workplace shooting in the last 40 years.