asforme wrote:
I keep hearing this more and more and it it is so saddening that people would trample on property rights which are at the heart of American liberty to try to defend another liberty. You have no constitutional right to be on the property of another, they invite you there to spend money, but you are not compelled to be there. They make the rules.
Is it that hard for you to find out what the policies of a business are and spend your money at businesses that maintain a safe environment by allowing their customers to defend themselves?
Think about the harm you would cause with such a law. If it was a state law I would imagine many businesses would leave, I would. I support the rights of patrons to be armed, but I don't want the state telling me so.
Also consider that businesses spend lots of money on lobbying groups. They lobby for laws that benefit their business and have huge pull in the political arena. Now you are forcing them to allow you in with your firearm, so that you can spend money at their store, so that they can turn around and use that money to lobby for your law to be changed and possibly lobby for other anti-gun laws.
Use your power as a consumer to protect your right to self defense instead of increasing the size and scope of our already bloated government.
Again, just to offer the counter-argument to this point of view.
It is LIFE that is at the heart of the american jurisprudence system, NOT property. Dead men own no property.
We already prevent discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political affilation and other traits or choices. I see no reason why lawful, peaceful, self-defense should be any different.
If you want to ban guns from your private home or residential property, your church, or even a private club, so be it. But the moment you hang out a shingle and advertise to the general public to come on in, you ought not be allowed to discriminate against those who choose to lawfully, peacefully carrry self-defense.
I also note that in numerous instances of the law, LIFE trumps property. Property owners do NOT get to chain fire doors shut, or build without sprinkler systems or smoke detectors. They do NOT get to ignore safety regs while building.
We do not live in Libertopia and never will and gun owners are NOT going to win any grand points with the public by sacrificing themselves as the first, last, or only group without basic civil rights protections in places of public accomodation.
Furthermore, while I can and do respect your position in the perfectly theoretical, I'm afraid you cross the line into Brady-campaign-like paranoid fantasy with your supposition that applying civil rights laws to gun owners is going to harm business in the least. Indeed, can you find a single statistic to suggest that States passing parking lot pre-emption or other protections for gun owners are seeing any decrease in business that could rationally be attributed to such policies?
You also mis-characterize the nature of business opposition to lawful carrying. In most cases it is NOT based on any philosophical hatred of guns and businesses are NOT going to spend money lobbying to attack our rights in most cases. Rather, opposition to carrying is based on current legal environment including liability laws, OSHA, and workers' comp (coupled with general HR laws that are so complex that most businesses just cut-and-paste policies from a couple of NYC based HR firms) laws that leads businesses to believe that banning guns outright is the safest harbor they can find. A properly crafted pre-emption law provides strict liability protection and overcomes these issues.
PLEASE, do NOT misstate such material facts. Your opinion on property rights is valid, even though I disagree with the hierarchy you choose of placing property supreme to life itself. But it is not proper to claim (with ZERO evidence) that civil rights laws will hurt business or put money into the hands of those who will actively oppose our RKBA.
Also, while your interest in Utah is welcome, please do not presume that our legal or cultural environment is exactly the same (or should be exactly the same) as is yours in the Old Domininion.
Charles