I read Bearing Arms in the Workplace written by an employment law specialist. We have gone back and forth in the comments for a few exchanges and I am posting the latest round here.

I do not believe that Mr. Phillips is anything other than ignorant. I don't believe that he fully understands the issue from the practical side, and while I am not a lawyer, I think some his legal reasoning is faulty. This is exactly the sort of person that the firearms community should be engaging with, as we all have the same goals of personal safety and security - but we differ on the implementation. I am ignorant of the legal liability of allowing employees to be armed, or simply not having a weapons policy. I would like to see some common ground and improvements that will actually keep people safer.

As I noted in my post, I’m not a constitutinal scholar. Neither am I a scholar of military history. Thus, what I say may be wrong or questionable when it comes to the intracacies of the constitution and the military. I’m mainly concerned about the impact of this issue on the workplace and employment law.

When the constitution was written during the formative years of our republic, I would think that assuring the right to arm the military wouldn’t have been stupid at all. It would have been imperative. At that point in our history, we were trying to figure a lot of things out in terms of our government and the people’s rights. Since the constitution’s preamble begins with “We the people,” it seems to me that “the people” applies to everything in the constitution. Many of the consitution’s articles as well as its amendments guarantee rights to both the federal and state governments. The people have rights as individuals and as citizens of the governments. Even the rights considered to be most individual in nature (as in speech, religion, assembly and press under the First Amendment) are practiced individually and collectively. Ideally, all constitutional rights belong to the people, but there is nothing I can find in the constitution that says with the kind of certainty you assert that whenver “the people” is used, it means individual rights and only individual rights.

Why would the government need a constitutional authority to secure the rights of the military to be armed? Under what circumstance would the government confiscate the arms of federal troops? The 2nd Amendment is to make sure the government can't disarm the military? You cannot be serious.

By your argument then the 4th Amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...") means that society in general should be secure, and there is no 4th Amendment protection for the individual? Clearly SCOTUS believes differently.

Gun control impacts everyone. That would include law-abiding citizens and criminals.

By procuring my firearms from illegal sources I bypass all legal controls. All of the paperwork schemes that law abiding citizens have to navigate simply disappear. The point is the people who are "controlled" by this extra regulation are not the source of the problem. The people who are the problem simply opt-out of the system and get their guns through other channels. Thus we continue to see multiple felons with multiple charges of firearms possession and battered women clutching restraining orders while going through their background checks and mandatory waiting periods.

It’s incomprehensible to me that when the constitution and its amendments were written that militia and military weren’t used interchangeably. References to those who served in the organized army and navy during the Revolutionary War were often called militiamen. Today, the two terms are used to have different meanings. I don’t know for sure what the founders menat when they said anything, just as no one knows what they meant, but I don’t think I’m too far out on a limb to believe that when Madison used militia, he wasn’t splitting hairs between what we call the militia and the military today. I just don’t think he was that prescient.

The militia is ABSOLUTELY NOT a standing army of federal troops, and the terms are not, and have never been interchangeable. Please reread your Federalist Papers. The dictionary definition:

"a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency.
• a military force that engages in rebel or terrorist activities, typically in opposition to a regular army.
• all able-bodied civilians eligible by law for military service."

The framers fought long and hard to determine if the US would even have a standing army. They had just experienced the tyranny of a government that used it's standing army against it's people.

I don’t think that various questions unanswered by Heller will be resolved in short order, unless by short order you mean decades. Rightly or wrongly, our system doesn’t work that way. It’s fine to blame the lawyers for that, but it’s a fact.

The legal challenges against other pieces of gun control have already begun. Some jurisdictions are simply rolling over without a challenge because there is no way to defend some of the existing laws in the face of Heller.

You are correct that there’s a limit on what employers can do to control weapons and violence in the workplace. Because the workplace belongs to the employer, however, the employer should have the right to determine how the attempt will be made to control weapons and violence in the workplace. Believe it or not, workplace policies do work sometimes. I know full well that an employee can bring a gun to work, regardless of what a policy says, and kill a few people. With all due respect, the percentages are pretty low that you, as a law-abiding citizen, would prevent that from happening just because you happen to have a gun in your briefcase.

The percentages might very well be pretty low, but some of that is because the populace of the workplace has been disarmed. According to the FBI crime statistics people who defend themselves with firearms (which may or may not include actually shooting) have drastically improved chances of not being victimized or injured. Saying that the number of people who defend themselves with firearms is pretty low is only accurate if you take it as a percentage of total victimizations. Armed people defend themselves much more successfully and frequently than unarmed defenders. There are relatively few people who are armed at the time they need to defend themselves, but that is more of an indictment of gun control than of guns.

My question is that when the disgruntled gunman is walking down the hall shooting the people who are hiding under their desks what are your options? Run, Fight, or Die. Because of a whimsical corporate policy that has no foundation in the realities of the situation one of those options has been greatly diminished.

Please consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hennard

and contrast this with the New Life Church Shooting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Colorado_YWAM_and_New_Life_shootings

As to police officers, they carry guns because they’re authorized to do so. It’s part of their job description. Although cops aren’t perfect, I place a lot of trust in them everyday to keep me safe. When it comes to the average workplace, police officers have almost nothing to do with preventing violence. That’s between an employer and its employees. As I said earlier, it’s the employer’s workplace, and the employer should have the right to set the rules of who brings what to work.

The police have the "authority" that is granted to them by the people. The police carry firearms for exactly the same reasons that private citizens do, and use them under the same circumstances: self-defense, or the defense of a third party. The police do not "shoot criminals" in the normal course of police work. The police shoot criminals who are an immediate threat to the officer or third parties. The police deal with criminals on a daily basis, so it makes sense for them to take the precaution of being armed. You know who else deals with criminals? The victims.

I am not disputing the right of an employer to set the rules in the workplace. The employer is well within his rights to create dangerous, stupid, and capricious rules. Good citizens (and employees) are never going to be the problem. While I am sure that no employer wants a dangerous work environment, and certainly no employer wants to have a workplace shooting an employment policy of disarmament does nothing to secure a safe work environment beyond providing legal protection for the employer should an incident occur.