PSH: Man fired for looking at gun web sites at work
a Pennsylvania gun owner named Tony Jackson may have been the first person ever fired for looking at Web sites featuring gun parts.
Jackson worked at a Lotus Notes administrator at Planco, a subsidiary of Hartford, Conn.-based insurance company The Hartford. He’s a firearms instructor and self-described Second Amendment advocate who, while at work in May 2007, visited Web sites including shotgun maker Mossberg and Impact Guns’s online store because he and his wife were planning on going skeet shooting and she needed a replacement part for her shotgun.
And as a bonus, his firing was because:
When Jackson was searching the Web for a replacement shotgun stock, supervisor Christie Vazquez — who admitted in a subsequent deposition to being “very anti-gun” and had quarreled with him before about politics — noticed what he was doing. Vazquez said she was scared because it was only a few weeks after the Virginia Tech massacre (see CBS News video), so she promptly reported her colleague’s Web browsing to Planco’s human resources department. Vazquez also informed the HR department that Jackson owned guns and was a member of the National Rifle Association.
I think one of my policies is through Hartford. That will soon change.
October 9th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Unfortunately, selective enforcement of Internet use policies at the workplace are a fact of life. He might be able to sue, since I doubt they enforce it uniformly, but…probably an uphill legal battle. He gets canned while the co-worker who looks at the “kitten of the day” blog/website and oohs and ahs for 20 minutes is probably in the clear.
My previous employer actually blocked most major Firearms-related manufacturer’s sites, with few exceptions. It always had a big scary warning page saying “The Content of this Website violates Company Policy” blah blah. The system was intelligent, too, because if I found a firearms site that I *could* access, it was only a matter of time before it got blocked, too.
So I just spent my slow night-shifts looking up gun related Wikipedia articles instead (in between calls); I even made a minor edit to the SKS page.
October 9th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Most major companies have policies not to use company computers for personal use. Whether he was looking at gun sites or porn really makes no difference to the abuse of using a company computer.
Now I am sure he was caught because the supervisor was looking at something to hang this man. He found it by checking the computer use and where the man was browsing.
There is a lesson and that is not to discuss politics in the office and not to use company computers for personal use.
He may not have come up on the radar if he had not discusses guns and 2A rights withe supervisor.
There is an old rule no discussion of politicas and religion at the office and in business relations unless the business is politics or religion. Even then people have to be careful not to overstep
I have people do their banking and paying bills on company computers which is ridiculous.
We have to learn the boundaries. Where to discuss person opinion and personal business. Too may women talk about their personal lives and such.
Keep to business and these thing s will not happen a long as he does his job.
Parts search should have been done on his own laptop not the companys. I even used my personal cell for personal calls to avoid using a company phone or cell phone.
October 9th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Markie Marxist sez: “Cool! A victory on another front in our war on private gun ownership! If we can’t make gun possession a crime by law, we can still get people fired from their jobs for having anything to do with guns. This helps to drive private gun owners further underground and denormalize private gun ownership. Gun owners may have the right to keep and bear arms and the right to free speech, but if they open their mouths they’re fired! Ha! Ha!”
October 9th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Well, I’ve worked for a *slew* of companies, and I can assure you that most companies do *NOT* have a policy of no web use. They have language about reasonable use and not interfering with work. Almost everybody browses at lunch. If there weren’t leniancy, then the IT guys like me would have upper management over a barrel, as the Apache logs don’t lie…
October 9th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
If everyone at my work place were fired for using the company computers for personal web browsing, we wouldn’t have anybody left except for the illegal immigrants who clean the toilets.
October 9th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
If you read the whole article they didn’t fire him for looking at gun sites. They just used that as a ‘reasonable’ excuse for firing him shortly after he got back from 3 months leave from heart surgery.
The supervisor who was so ‘frightened’ by the sites he looked at is the same one who admits she enjoyed it when he took her shooting and who asked him to accompany her when checking out potential apartments in questionable parts of town.
So it’s really a double bad thing:
1) Finding an acceptable way to fire someone because their medical expenses have gone up
2) Finding ‘looking at gun parts sites’ an acceptable way.
October 9th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
That stinks all the way around, but look at what his job is: Lotus Notes Administrator. He has a better case on the fired coming off medical leave.
October 9th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Pretty touchy for a company that used to ensure slaves as PROPERTY.
October 9th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I know I’ve posted this here before, but it seems relevant.
It’s a couple comics by a guy that got fired for talking about buying a 22.
http://www.threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2007-04-20
October 9th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
yes, the best thing to do when worried about the guy looking at guns is to get him fired.
Does captain douch want to be a martyr for the gun (people) control cause? Not that the guy would do it, but that’s what his drippy drawered boss thought at the time apparently.
October 9th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Fuck, I talk about guns all the time with the people I work with. And I work at a freakin’ competitor to The Hartford. Hope it doesn’t get me canned. If it does, well, there you go. I’m not going to live my life cowering in the corner.
October 10th, 2009 at 12:41 am
I read Tam’s blog at break most days, some of the other gun blogs also, the only site I’ve tried to goto that my company blocks is this one. The only reason I can think that it’s blocked is the word Porn showing up in a post title about once a day.
October 10th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Yeah, Uncle! Label it Gun Pr0n. with a zero.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:31 am
“…Tony Jackson may have been the first person ever fired for looking at Web sites featuring gun parts.”
First person? That self serving naiveté isn’t surprising from CBS. Tony Jackson and a thousand other guys whose gun surfing was not approved of by the anti-gun feminists in the HR department.
The company I used to work for recorded all phone and computer use together. They could play back your phone calls simultaneously with every screen you brought up, everything you typed and every mouse movement you made. That makes it very easy to screen out gun owners who surf gun sites and then find a reason to fire them. Call it “political cleansing”. It’s a secret front in the war on private gun ownership that would be difficult to expose.