Playboypenguin said:
Yes they do. On their own property a person has the right to not be around a gun. As an employer I have the right to decide that I will honor the desire of others to not be around guns while they are on my property.
What entity actually owns the property you conduct your business on? You, or your company? If the owner is a company, I would say that you do not (or should not) have that right.
Regardless, you do not have a right to incorporate and run a business unimpeded. Businesses have been regulated by government since their genesis.
I propose that all states keep their trespass laws intact, but get rid of any sign-posting laws that allow property owners to preemptively warn off armed individuals, and remove a property-owner's liability in the case where any employee or guest commits a crime or causes an accident while in legal possession of any object or weapon used in that accident/crime.
If you don't want guns or other weapons on your property or your company's property, your ultimate recourse is not to let anyone on it. Unless you screen everyone and have armed guards to deny entrance to any gun-wielding lunatic who decides that the screening process is not for him, I would say that the greater rights violation is the one employers routinely impose on their employees.
I think this is a very similar issue to housing law, actually. I would also like to see gun bans in housing contracts be invalidated. True, both employees and renters could theoretically go somewhere else if they don't like the rules of the specific employment/rental contract they're offered. That hasn't stopped courts from limiting employer/landlord rights in myriad ways, and they are limited
for very good reasons, most of the time. There is never an infinite selection of suitable habitations and/or companies offering work, and not everyone can start their own business or work for themselves. Unless you can guarantee that property will always be available with a rental contract agreeable to the renter, or that a company with agreeable employment rules will always be available, I don't think you can fall back on property rights as a business owner or landlord to prohibit arbitrary things you may not like possessed by your employees/tenants.
That doesn't mean there's a right to employment. Nobody's requiring you to run a business. Nobody's requiring you to hire anyone. Nobody's requiring you to tolerate disruptive behavior (much less behavior that materially hurts the company). However, if you do offer employment, there should be some limits to how you can discriminate. Otherwise, it's not so much a company you're running as a social colony run under socialist/dictatorial management, where basically everyone is forced to operate with no latitude for individuality... like an ant colony, for instance. I'm not arguing that such businesses aren't perhaps optimally efficient. However, I don't think they are compatible with society's general concept of individual rights.
As in criminal law, I'm starting to object wherever I see anyone, government or business or individual, try to discriminate on the basis of
possessions someone else might have. Possessions (barring certain extreme cases) are not inherently disruptive, nor do they present an innate danger to others. In cases where they are disruptive, removing them from sight is adequate to prevent disruption. Laws against possessions encourage erosion and violations of the 4th amendment; corporate rules against possessions encourage witch-hunts and overly-intrusive workplace monitoring. I realize there's no constitutional law against intrusive employee monitoring, but that doesn't mean companies inherently have the right to ban possessions regardless of whether they're disruptive.
Danzig said:
Again, I maintain that we are all GUESTS when we enter other people's businesses and as guests...we can be uninvited at the owner's discretion.
True in the case of private property owned by an individual with a visitor not under contract. True in the case of visitors to businesses not open to the public (but these are the exact people NOT subject to corporate "rules" against gun carry). Not true in the case of employees. They are not guests, really. They have contractual obligations to be there, that can only be nullified by the company terminating those employees, which goes quite a bit farther than merely de-inviting them from the company grounds. Not exactly the same thing as being a guest, IMO, even in an at-will state.
The final case is that of "visitors" to businesses open to the public. I would say they're not really "guests" in the sense you're intending. Of course, a business owner operating a store could screen everyone who enters for guns and anything else he doesn't like -- perhaps get rid of those pesky customers who have a copy of the Koran in their purse or man-purse. Stores generally won't do that because pre-screening is an annoyance that reduces and annoys customers, and therefore profit.
I also think there's something in the semantics of the word "guest" that makes it not apply when you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of random "guests" per day coming onto your property. I'm not talking about whatever legal connotations the word may have, I'm just talking about the word in general everyday context.