Robert Levy, “co-counsel to Dick Heller in District of Columbia v. Heller^[a],” has written a piece for the Tampa Tribune that I find a bit disturbing. In it, Levy argues against what he calls “the ‘Take Your Guns to Work’ law” in Florida:

Despite the bill’s overwhelming support among his Republican colleagues in the state Legislature, Gov. Crist should have vetoed it. Still, if the business community challenges the constitutionality of the legislation, perhaps a proper respect for property rights will be restored.

Essentially, the new law prohibits business owners from banning guns locked in cars on company property. It applies to employees, customers, and others who have been invited onto the property, provided they have a permit to carry the gun.

By calling this law the “Take Your Guns to Work” law, Levy puts himself in the same category as those who nicknamed Florida’s “Shoot First” law^[b]. The law is not about taking your guns to work (or into any other privately owned property with public or semi-public access) — it’s about allowing gun owners who hold a license to carry (for simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to call these people “gun owners” for the duration of this post) to keep guns in their car while they’re out and about.

I agree that private property owners should have the right to tell individuals who are on their property that they are unwelcome if they are carrying a gun^[c]. Allowing those private property owners to tell individuals that they can’t have a gun locked in their parked cars, though, is over the top.

This is not about violating the property owner’s rights; it is about not letting the property owner’s rights to override the gun owner’s rights even outside the property owner’s property.

Suppose a gun owner works in a place where he is forbidden to carry a gun. He respects his employer’s right to ban firearms on their property, so he doesn’t carry at work, but leaves his gun in the car. But what if the employer bans guns in the car, too? Well, the employer now hasn’t just disarmed the employee while he’s on their property, they’ve disarmed him from the moment he leaves the house, effectively negating his carry license entirely if he intends to go to work.

Where would he keep the gun, if not in his locked car? Should he get a chain lock (like those used for bikes) and chain his gun to a parking meter or bike rack before entering the employer’s property? Will every property owner be required to provide a set of lockers where employees, customers, and guests can keep guns (or any other “banned” property) during their visit to the property? Of course not. By banning the gun owner from even keeping the gun in his car, the employer has forced him to leave the gun at home when coming to work. If we extend this to say that retail stores and any other public access facility can ban guns on their parking lots.

Here’s the way I see it: I feel that a car is, effectively, a “pocket” of private property. A property owner can decide whether or not they will allow a car owner to bring his car onto their property, but they cannot dictate what the car owner carries in the car. (This could easily be extended into an argument where a person’s personal space is a similar “pocket” of private property, but I believe that’s a step further than I’m willing to go — allowing gun owners to keep the guns in their cars is a fair compromise, I believe.)

1. If you’re not familiar with the case, Levy describes the core issue (in the linked article): “…whether the Second Amendment can be invoked to invalidate Washington, D.C.’s ban on all functional firearms.” [↩]
2. The “shoot first” law basically says that, assuming he is not involved in unlawful behavior, a person who is attacked is not required to flee before engaging in self-defense. Opponents of this law quite predictably (and quite dishonestly) chose to misrepresent the law and then fight it using whatever ridiculous straw-men they could come up with. [↩]
3. I also believe that, by doing so, the private property owners are implicitly stating that they are taking responsibility for the safety of everyone they have so disarmed, but that’s an argument for another day. [↩]

My first instinct is to say that whether there’s a playoff system or not in college football is none of Congress’s business, but the more I think about it, I’d rather they were busy doing this than raising taxes or passing stupid laws that will just annoy me.

Philip Carter at the Washington Post’s Intel Dump blog takes issue with something that President Bush said in an interview last Friday with ABC’s Martha Raddatz, about his insistence that we were winning in Iraq despite the bad news coming out of the area, back in 2006. First, here’s the part of the interview he seems to have the issue with (he quotes more, but this is the pertinent part, I think):

RADDATZ: .You were saying, ‘We’re winning. We have a plan for victory. We are winning,’ up through October.

BUSH: Well, there was — I also recognized — I think if you’d go through the — kind of fully analyze my statements, I was also saying, “The fighting is very tough, it’s — you know, the extremism is unacceptable. The murder is unacceptable.” And you know, it’s very important to be realistic.

RADDATZ: But the overall thing — when you say, “We’re winning,” you know what the American people hear. You know how that will play.

BUSH: Well, yes. I think we — and I wanted — that’s as much trying to bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well as — look, you can’t have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, “It’s not worth it,” or, “You’re losing.” I mean, what does that do for morale? I’m the commander in chief of the military as well, obviously, as, you know, somebody who speaks to the country. And if you look at my remarks, they were balanced. They weren’t Pollyannaish.

And Carter’s response:

It’s disappointing to hear now, two years after the fact, that the president was knowingly bull—-ing us the whole time. And that he justified such dishonesty in the name of supporting the troops and protecting their morale. That’s an insult to America’s men and women in uniform (and their families), who deserve to be told the truth by their political leaders about what’s going on. It’s also an insult to us, as voters, who deserve the truth so we can make the right decisions in the voting booth.

Bush says (and Raddatz seems to agree) that Bush was being honest about the fact that there were some disheartening things going on in Iraq in the summer of 2006. He acknowledged that there was an unacceptable level of extremist violence and murder, that the fighting was tough, but he also stayed focused — we will win this; we are winning this. Raddatz asserts, then, that the only thing that the American people heard was, “We are winning”^[a]. Carter’s response seems to be based on the (incorrect) assumption that “We are winning” is all that Bush said. It isn’t.

Bush was acknowledging the bad while highlighting the positive. He admitted that things weren’t looking good at the moment without giving into defeatism and pessimism. As much as I hate comparing something relatively frivolous like sports to a war, this is the same thing that any good coach would do when his team was hitting a rough patch, but still clinging to a narrow lead. Admit that things are looking grim, that things have not been going as well as he’d like recently, but stay focused on the fact that all is not lost — winning is not out of the question^[b].

Bush is far from blameless in the handling of the War on Terror in general and the Iraqi theater specifically, but blaming him for trying to keep morale up when bad news was coming in (especially when he acknowledged the bad news, even if he downplayed it more than some people may have liked) is a bit underhanded, in my opinion.

( þ Q and O )

1. I’d be interested to know if the reason that’s the American people heard only “we are winning” was because that’s what the mainstream media and the Democrats repeatedly told us he said, without mentioning anything else. [↩]
2. and, in Iraq, even with the increase in deaths during the summer months of ’06, I don’t believe there was any real concern that we couldn’t win; remember that most of the reason these extremists that are fighting against us have any success at all is because we have to hold back because we (unlike our enemies) are concerned about the Iraqi civilians. If I must go with a sports analogy, I’d say this was not a team that was losing, but a team that had had an almost unbelievable lead, and lost a chunk of it. [↩]

Sorry for the silence around here lately. I just can’t get myself interested enough in politics to write about it this year, and with everything else going on, I just haven’t had much to post. I will try to do better, though, I swear.

It doesn’t bother me so much that the Charleston Gazette thinks that Bigfoot is news. It doesn’t even bother me that they think that an expedition to find Bigfoot didn’t actually find him is news. What bothers me is that they think it’s front page news.