A Stitch in Haste

The State of Florida is considering making it a felony — a felony — for businesses to ban guns from their property:

Homicides are one of the four most frequent work-related fatal events, together with highway incidents, falls and being struck by an object, data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows. Workplaces where guns were specifically permitted were five to seven times more likely to be the site of a worker homicide relative to those where all weapons were prohibited, a report released by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said.
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"The Florida legislation is among the most outrageous bills being pushed by the NRA," said Brian J. Siebel, senior attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence's Legal Action Project. "Walt Disney World has a gun-free policy. Mickey Mouse would become a felon in Florida," Siebel said.
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The proposal has sparked debate over which right is more important: a company's property right or the individual's right to bear arms.

If this is the current state of the debate, then there is no debate at all, because the libertarians have already defaulted and vanished into a fog of myopia.

I blogged about a similar proposal in Missouri back in December 2004 and again regarding an NRA-led boycott of ConocoPhillips in August 2005. My thesis is of course unchanged, because the issue has not changed and the analysis is too remedial to require revisiting it.

There is no great "rights versus rights" or "libertarians versus libertarians" conflict here. Property rights are always — always — supreme. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. All other rights, including Second Amendment rights, are always — always — subordinate to property rights.

If you enter my home, I have the right to insist that you not smoke. Or breast-feed your baby or pick your nose or clip your toenails. Or bring a gun. How is this in any way a difficult concept, especially for libertarians (or anyone else who describes themselves as "pro-rights")? Who would dare say that Florida could pass a law making it a felony — a felony — for me not to allow you to bring a gun into my home?

Private home. Private business. Private parking lot. Private property. It's all the same. No fundamental difference whatsoever.

Your Second Amendment rights apply to you — but only on your property, not mine. Just as I have no right to come into your home and demand that you discard your gun — while it is on your property — surely I must have the right to demand that you discard it while on my property. How can people not see that the reciprocal right of you to control your property is for me to control my property? How can people not see that an "asymmetrical right" is a contradiction in terms?

"Difficult" questions of individual liberties only become difficult when they are incorrectly framed. Acknowledging the obvious — that property rights trump Second Amendment rights — removes all difficulty from the debate, and removes all legitimacy from these absurd "right to pack and park" proposals.

Via LP Blog. More thoughts at Liberty Zone.