Anti-gun employers endanger our Second Amendment rights

By Gerard Valentino

For years, pro-gun advocates have rightfully pointed out that several key groups are a serious threat to our gun rights. Most are avowed anti-gun organizations or have some other emotion based argument for wanting to confiscate the guns of law-abiding citizens. But, a bigger and more dangerous threat continues to put our firearms rights in jeopardy – employers.

Most of us need our jobs to secure the financial needs of our families and can’t simply change jobs each time our employer does something to infringe on our rights. Although in a perfect world, we would never be forced to make the choice between financial need and safety, in practice people are forced to do so more often in America every day.

In a misguided decision believed to secure the safety of employees, most companies ban guns on company property by workers at any time and for any reason. Although they are not allowed to dictate whether you can have a bible, political signage or even racist propaganda in your personal vehicle while on company property, they often are legally able to say you can’t keep a your gun in your car.

That gives employers unfair control over your personal life because it effectively bans legal concealed carry going to and from work. Most employees wouldn’t accept it if their company told them what they could do on the way to and from work, yet they blindly accept being disarmed during the trip.

Even worse, the misguided ploy by employers to keep workers disarmed can leave many unable to defend their family since parents often pick up their children on the way home from work.

If your employer told you that keeping a car seat on company property was unacceptable and left you without one to transport your children it would leave to widespread outrage. A misplaced fear of workplace shootings, however, makes many think that banning guns in employee’s cars will keep rampage shootings from happening.

Nearly every workplace shooting in the last twenty five years occurred where employees were already restricted from having guns, yet it didn’t stop the deranged coward intent on taking out as many co-workers as possible.

Just like in schools and at courthouses, the mentally challenged murderers who want to kill and maim as many people as possible know very few people can resist with a gun while at work.

So, in yet another case a leftist public safety policy proves to cause the very incident it is designed to stop.

While most Americans believe in the right to bear arms as a fundamental individual right, they refuse to make the next logical leap that would show it is therefore unacceptable for employers to infringe on those rights. Although many of us would like the government to stay out of private matters, Buckeye Firearms Association Legal Chair Ken Hanson points out that the government has already said that businesses can’t ignore our rights just because we choose to work at a given company.

If the government is going to make it illegal for a business to discriminate on the basis of national origin, disability or race, then it should be illegal for them to discriminate against people who carry a gun for self-defense. The Bill of Rights doesn’t note that only some of the fundamental rights affirmed there are to be protected from the whim of government. Instead, they are all worth protecting to the point that government, knowing the power that employers have over the average person’s life, has extended the protections against discrimination to privately owned businesses.

Whether people like it or not, the government has inserted itself into the relationship between employee and employer, for the most part it protects the employee from discrimination. For some reason, however, the government hasn’t forced companies to protect the right of citizens to bear arms. It is typical of the he way the government operates that it wouldn’t protect the right to bear arms since one of the principle reasons the founders refused to let the government infringe that right is so people couldn’t be terrorized by their own elected representation.

The founders understood that government is, by its very nature, evil and likely to commit tyrannically acts against its own people. Many now believe that large corporations fall into the same category and that seems to play itself out with the way they treat employees and particularly employees who own guns.

There is no altruistic reason for corporations to do anything; they are in business, for business and rightfully so. Even when a corporation does something that benefits the environment or that benefits charity, it’s done for purely selfish reasons and that’s perfectly acceptable. When it becomes a problem is when an employer’s policies deny their workers the fundamental right to self-protection.

Leaving an employee at the mercy of a criminal thug is immoral and if more Americans would stand up for what is right then corporations could be held to the same standard on self-defense as they have on the environment, and the right to work expected by all Americans.

Changing a corporate culture that puts a false liability ahead of the right of people to defend their own life is possible. The green movement was able to change the corporate culture in America by forcing Americans to change their purchasing habits and although it wasn’t easy they laid out the blueprint.
Now, it is incumbent on gun owners and self-defense advocates to learn from that blueprint and force corporations to do the right thing.

Otherwise, when your employer fires the next worker who leaves a gun in their car in anticipation of an after work trip to the range we can’t blame anyone else – the finger will be rightfully pointed directly at fellow gun owners.

Gerard Valentino is the Buckeye Firearms Association Central Ohio Chair, writes for the ValentinoChronicle.com and teaches the Ohio Concealed Carry class through Center Mass LTD.