Krumm on guns
Bob Krumm posted various questionairres he’s filled out on his site. Here’s the one from the NRA. He says full-auto weapons should be licensed. He also says he thinks current laws are sufficient. Tennessee laws, other than concealed carry, basically mimic federal laws. He supports expanding places where citizens can lawfully carry. He opposes the assault weapons ban. He opposes registration. He wants to scrap the $10 TICS fee because it is redundant. He opposes limiting lawful commerce at gun shows.
He also opposes the Lautenberg amendment. I should note that he relayed a story about the Lautenberg amendment in comments a bit back. He noted:
I ran into this exact problem with one of my best NCOs when I commanded a Cavalry Troop. Thanks to Senator Lautenberg’s overly broad legislation, our nation lost a great soldier when we could have used him, because he was prohibited from being issued a weapon in the most controlled weapons environment possible: the U.S. Army. All because his ex alleged (and never proved) something during a bitter divorce.
Oh, and repeated letters to Sen. Lautenberg, written by the NCO’s commander were never once responded to.
One nit I would pick is that he opposes laws allowing people to keep weapons in their car on company premises. He states that private property owners can control their own property. I concur that they should be allowed to do that. Of course, my vehicle is my property and if I keep a weapon in it, it’s my business and not my employer’s.
July 17th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Ah but your car is on your employer’s property – it’s a conflicing mish-mash of private property at that point.
Perhaps the law should say that private property can decide the gun-carry policies for their property. After all, you have a right to smoke, but not in my house or on my yard.
July 17th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
I don’t think it’s so much a right as the ability, but that’s an interesting example. To give a comparision, would it be reasonable to prevent people from bringing cigarettes or cigars in their cars while on your property?
Could a company force you to remove a bumper sticker from your car, since freedom of speech doesn’t cross when you’re on another person’s property?
July 17th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Have to agree with Bill.
The way one of the fed guys I worked with a couple of years ago got around things was by parking on the street instead of our leased parking garage. He had a little vault in his vehicle. Unless he was on fed leased property he was packing.
Shamless plug:
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid! LOL
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July 17th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Could a company force you to remove a bumper sticker from your car, since freedom of speech doesn’t cross when you’re on another person’s property?
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember someone in Tennessee getting fired for having a Kerry sticker on their car. The Bush tax cuts were what allowed the employer to hire this person in the first place. The owner thought it was appropriate that if (s)he wanted to advocate against their own job, he’d oblige.
The competing rights is a tricky question for me.
If I state I don’t want X to be brought into my house or on my property and you do so, I am fully within my rights to throw you off of it whether it’s in your car or on your person. (It would make me an ass, but people have the right to be asses.) If you don’t like it, you don’t have to come to my house.
If you don’t like your employers rules about their property, you don’t have to work for them.
At the same time while the Mom and Pop restaurant is essentially “a person”, Microsoft isn’t. As such, does MS have equal rights to a person? I don’t think so. Last time I checked, MS can’t vote. It’s owners/shareholders can as individuals, but MS as a collective can not.
The best solution I can think of is that privately owned companies can restrict what is brought on their property the same as individuals can. Publicly traded companies, however, in giving up personal responsibility to the owners, cannot trump a persons rights due to property ownership.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
That should be “of the owners”.
July 17th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
Not of interest to the great state of Tennessee in free America, but here’s the latest blurb about the ‘smart gun’ technology that Joisey wants to force everyone to use….
Seems it’s a ‘bit’ farther off than the gun wussies hoped it would be…and about 30 times more expensive….not including the court challenges when it finally gets working, if ever.
Smart Gun
July 18th, 2006 at 11:55 am
An employer cannot ban firearms in your vehicle without the concomitant denial of your rights when you are not on his property. In other words, he has disarmed you for the entire day, until you return home. And while ensuring that you are disarmed he accepts no responsibility for your safety.
So if we must balance competing rights, it seems only just that the personal property of the employee, his car, be as inviolate as the private property of the employer. Just because the employer invites you into his lot, does mean you invite him into your car. Any removal of the firearm, from the vehicle would constitute a violation of the employers’ rights, even to carry it to the trunk to lock it up. However, if it remains in the car at all times, it is not the employers’ right nor business to interfere in any fashion.
That we believe it is and that the courts have upheld the employers in this dispute is merely evidence of how far from the original context of liberty we have moved. Everything in our founding documents was designed to protect the interests and liberties of the individual, yet we are constantly placing the collective above the individual. Down that path lies slavery.
If not one individual in the collective has the liberty to do a thing, how then does the collective have it , except by unjustifiable force over individuals?
July 18th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
An employer cannot ban firearms in your vehicle without the concomitant denial of your rights when you are not on his property. In other words, he has disarmed you for the entire day, until you return home.
Not so. You can choose to park elsewhere and leave your weapon in the car there. Nothing says you have to park in your employers lot.
Second, if I did grant that disallowing a gun in your car disarmed you until you return home, why can I as a homeowner do it, but I as a business owner cannot?
July 18th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Menace- I’d say the biggest reason is the employer’s power over you. An employer can also argue that he can have any working conditions that he wants, and pay you whatever he wants, because you can always get another job. The laws protecting against those scenarios are due to the reality that not everyone can find another job easily if they don’t like their current employment. I honestly see this as no different. I like Montana’s new law, which requires (if I read it right) that no employer ban firearms at work unless they can provide an equal level of security to that employee as he would have with his firearm.
July 20th, 2006 at 9:39 am
UNHchabo,
A couple of issues:
1) From a purely libertarian viewpoint, working conditions and min wage laws are statist and shouldn’t exist and the fact that they do, doesn’t change anything.
2) For corporations, I think you are absolutely right. When you incorporate, you absolve the owners from any personal responsibility. As such the business stops being “you” with absolute rights to control your own personally owned property and the business becomes it’s own legal entity. You don’t own the property, the business owns the property. When you gain protections from society that individuals don’t have, you have to give some of your rights to control your business back to that society. You can’t demand that society provide you with extra protections and then tell them to F-off.
The problem I have is the Mom and Pop businesses. The family owned jewelry shop with 10 employees, the auto mechanic with 4. These are not “I can’t find another job” type situations. That the gov’t has been doing such things in these realms doesn’t mean they ought to.
July 20th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Masked Menace, your alternative parking plan is a non-starter,for most people the only parking available are the employers’ lots, which they invite you to when they hire you. Those who live in a major metropolitan area may have other options, or at least some of them might.
Using your logic about what you own giving you the right to strip others of theirs when they are invited onto your property gives rise to the question, why can’t you kill persons you want to as long as you are on private property. After all, if they don’t like it, they don’t have to accept your invitation or your job. Why is it not appropriate for employers to demand sexual favors from employees, after all;his property, his rules. As long as his demands are a condition of employment and private property gives him the right to negate yours, you either must accept those conditions or find another job. According to your logic, what the employee can’t do is stop him from doing any damn thing wants to anyone he wants or denying anyone any rights whatsoever on his property, and if his depredations on the rights of others extend past the limits of his property that is his right, that is according to your logic.
I tend to be less cooperative than that. I remember one oil refinery turn-around I worked on where the contractor would chain the gate to the parking lot shut after work started. I asked them not to do that. I had two objections, one was personal, no man locks me in anywhere. I am not a slave and will not be chained to my work, not even if the chain is around a double gate with a padlock, as was the case. The other objection was a safety issue. With the gate chained and locked shut there was no escape route for personnel should explosions or fire occur. Explosions and fires are not rare enough in that environment to safely ignore their possibility.
They didn’t remove the lock and chain. I cut them off two days in a row with an acetylene torch. The third day I cut the gates down and cut the posts that anchored them and the ends of the fence either side of the opening. About the time I was preparing to beat the Hell out of the people that were going to fire me for it (I told you I won’t cooperate with the violation of myself), a fire broke out in a 1 million gallon gasoline storage tank and the floating roof stuck allowing air to enter. That means we could have had a 1million gallon gasoline bomb go off. Guess who the first sonsofbitches to run through the opening I had provided were. Yeah, that’s right. You got it. Not only did I not get fired, but I saved them millions of dollars in possible liablitly if all those men had not been able to leave the site.
My question to you, if those men had been trapped and killed because they were locked in should the company that locked them in be held accountable? Bear in mind this very question has been to court in various cases and the answer has always been in the affirmative.
My next question to you, if employees are killed or maimed as a direct result of company policy regarding denial of employees’ rights to possess a firearm in the employees’ private property (cars), why should the employer not be held as accountable as in the above question?
July 21st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Again, your oil refinery is a corporation and as such loses the rights of an individual. For a sole proprieter, yes the owners are personally responsible for negligence.
If you don’t want the personal responsibility, then incorporate and give up the rights to absolute control of the property.