Guns At Work

Prospect: Business And Gun Lobby At Odds On Workplace Firearms

(The American Prospect)  This column was written by Robert B. Reich.

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Listen to the evening news and you’re likely to hear a grizzly story about a disaffected worker or estranged spouse or dissatisfied customer arriving at a workplace and going ballistic. It’s all too common.

About 17 employees are murdered every week in American workplaces by someone with a gun, making gun-related killings the third-biggest safety hazard facing American workers -- right after vehicles and machines. In fact, gun-related homicide is the leading cause of death at the workplace for women.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina have shown that killings are five times more likely to occur at workplaces where guns are allowed as where they’re prohibited. It’s just common sense.

So what are we doing about this? Some well-known American companies are taking action. It’s government that’s the problem.

A while back, the Weyerhauser Corporation banned weapons in cars parked in its employee parking lots. Workers who thereafter arrived with shotguns, handguns, rifles, and automatic weapons were fired.

But legislators in Oklahoma didn’t like this at all. Apparently Oklahoma’s lawmakers are more concerned about protecting gun owners than protecting average working people. So they enacted a state law preventing companies from instituting no-guns-in-company-parking-lot policies. Unless something’s done, the law goes into effect this November.