A bill now pending before the Indiana General Assembly would allow employers to be sued for requiring employees to disclose information about gun ownership or to reveal whether they have weapons or ammunition in their vehicles.
We think the bill should be rejected.
It’s not surprising that an employer might want to know whether an employee has a gun in the parking lot, and it should certainly be within that employer’s rights to find out.
The debate grows out of the so-called “parking lot gun law” adopted by legislators a year ago. The National Rifle Association says some companies are willfully violating the law, and it is rallying its members in support of what it has dubbed “parking lot 2.0.”
We agree that some of the examples cited by the NRA seem ludicrous. Setting up a special area of the parking lot for vehicles with guns inside doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Still, groups such as the Indiana Chamber of Commerce say businesses are doing their best to follow what they consider to be a vague piece of legislation. They say the provisions are particularly confusing for companies that are exempted from the law’s requirements.
So it might well be that lawmakers should revisit last year’s law. To our way of thinking, though, the best solution would be to repeal it.
For us, the best argument against the measure is that lawmakers chose to exempt certain classes of employers. If it’s OK for a daycare operator to ban guns on its property, why shouldn’t it be OK for a bakery or some other organization?
Most of us will stand up in support of individual rights. We agree that individuals should have a right to choose their own hairstyles, to wear the kind of clothes they want to wear.
But we also understand that employers have the authority to restrict those rights when we’re on company time. An employee might have to trade in that T-shirt for a shirt with a collar and those jeans for a pair of khakis.
We all have freedom of speech. We can stand in the public square and say what we want.
But we can’t necessarily do that on company time.
Employers have long had the right to impose certain restrictions on their employees. Guns in the parking lot should be no exception.
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