I have to come down on the side of the employers here, even if I disagree with their policy. The Bill of Rights protects you against the government, not other private citizens, including businesses.
If the guns are not locked away in the vehicle, I have no problem with AOL's rights. I do have a problem, though, if the guns are locked away and are unaccessable except by the owner.
It presumes that someone may commit a crime with the gun on their premises - that's a major leap of logic.
What if somebody had marijuana in their glove compartment or cigarettes on the dashboard? Does the employer have a right to fire you because you drove a vehicle with either of these in your possession? How far do we want to take this concept?
And, somehow, I'd imagine AOL wouldn't be bright enough to fire a Middle Easterner with five tons of dynomite parked in his U-Haul on company property.
I hope this gets appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. This would appear to be a fourth admendment challenge to unlawful search and seizure. It's not like the guns are being brought into the workplace just because they are locked away in the parking lot.
So you think companies should be able to fire people for being too old, or the wrong color, or for not putting out?
I understand that some folks will answer "yes", on the basic principle of Freedom of association, and this doesn't mean that they condone the behavior.
However, there are laws preventing companies from firing folks for a host of reasons. Repealling these laws will be next to impossible, as well as a waste of time. So as gunowners, we should jump on the bandwagon instead of being a "chump" and letting companies trample on us.
I have to come down on the side of the employers here, even if I disagree with their policy
If this was Pete's Hardware Store, and "Pete" was the owner, then maybe I would agree. Pete is an individual and has the Right to hire and fire whomever he pleases in his private store. But in this case, it's a corporation. A corporation is NOT an individual, and does NOT have the same Rights as individuals have.
The Bill of Rights protects you against the government, not other private citizens, including businesses.
Yeah, but we have many more Rights than just the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
I would have to disagree. The Constitution and the bill of rights note the rights of all and generally tell us that our rights end where those of another person begin. If you carry a weapon for personal safety and the employer can't garauntee your safety from their parking lot to your home, that is the issue. Infringing your right to carry at this point becomes an infringement on your ability to protect yourself. And you never know when you might need to pull the trigger.
I worked for Kmart Corp as my first fulltime job. While I was working for them, my district manager took a trip up north from here and was murdered in a parking lot. You never know when it might come in handy to have something to protect yourself with. And Liberals are trying to take that ability away from us. And it goes without saying that if you take away a people's ability to defend themselves, you also remove their abiltiy to be a threat collectively should you choose to exploit and subjugate them. Liberals aren't put off by your ability to protect yourself - it's your ability to defend against their attempts to subjugate that they resent.
If the owners are flaunting their weapons or whatever or in some way causing attention to the weapons or to themselves being armed, I would tend to agree with you. As it is, if they are out of sight in a trunk or concealed space, I think the employee has some privacy expectation. After all, a company can not set up peep cameras in rest rooms, even though they clearly own or control that area.
I think that a company should make such policies as this known up front and make it a contractual matter: an employee, when hired, signs something that says on the condition of his or her employment agrees not to carry weapons of any kind in his vehicle when the vehicle is to be parked on site. At that point, everything is up front and the employee can (and should) tell the employer to screw off and go work somewhere else.
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men," Apparently, one of the reasons Governments are instituted is to protect your rights against others and to protect their rights against you.