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Workplace bad enough without a gun around
© St. Petersburg Times, Zephyrhills City Manager Steve Spina and I don't always see eye to eye on things -- probably to his credit -- and sometimes I disagree with him. But he is dead right on the subject of guns in the workplace, and I fully support his recent move to ban them there. He is also right about putting on display controversial paintings of partially nude folks, artwork that is part of a project designed to call attention to the problem of domestic violence -- but one of my capable colleagues is addressing that subject. As one might expect any time the word gun comes up, there has been more knee-jerk reaction than you would find in the quality control testing division of a reflex hammer factory. Gun advocates, even some of the responsible ones, are aghast at what they see as a violation of the constitutional right to bear arms. Nonsense. Suspension of constitutional rights is what working is about. What the Constitution guarantees us, much to the dismay of those who are bothered by the concept of people actually having fun, is the right to a good time. That's what life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness are generally about. When you work, unless you have one of a very few jobs (like mine), you generally agree to interrupt your pursuit of happiness for eight hours or so per day so that you can come up with the financial wherewithal to begin pursuing it again, right around the beginning of happy hour. Your employers pay you to do that so they can get lots of money and make better use of their leisure time. It's not a perfect system, and some of us wind up happier than others, but that's how it works. En route to all of that happiness, you temporarily waive things like your right to free speech. If you think I am kidding, try telling your boss what you really think of that last round of pay cuts. You also give up your freedom of movement, agreeing to stay in the workplace (in most instances), and your freedom of assembly, which you will hastily learn if you try to have a kegger on the assembly line any time soon. If your company has a newsletter, it is the employer who owns the press. Therefore freedom of the press applies to the employer and not the employee and, although current case law calls for employers to interfere as little as possible in the practice of religion, NASA probably won't let you sacrifice a goat in the clean room and you can't lead prayer during class if you are a public school teacher. And there are a whole bunch of places you can't take guns, Second Amendment or not. Most court personnel can't take guns into the courtroom or courthouse. Teachers can't take them to school and people who work in airports can't carry them past a certain point. Pilots can't carry them. Prison guards in Florida can't carry them inside the prison and, incidentally, St. Petersburg Times employees can't carry them while they are on Times business. I'm sure that Zephyrhills City Hall gets its share of walk-in crazies, including some who aren't on the City Council, but armed city employees aren't the answer. Given the nature of small town politics in Central Florida, and keeping in mind places like Port Richey and Crystal River, the one thing we don't need in city halls or council chambers is people with guns. I sincerely hope that Spina has better luck with this effort than he has with a couple of recent failed initiatives, including an attempt to outlaw gossip among city employees (Yeah, that's going to happen.) and trying to keep firefighters from referring to labor negotiations with the city with a slang term related to group masturbation. Eyebrows and voices get raised over issues like that. Feelings get hurt. But nobody gets shot. And keeping guns out of the building is a good step toward that.
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Times columns today Eric Deggans Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Gary Shelton John Romano Sara Fritz From the Times North Suncoast desks |
