Gun bills send wrong message of deadly force
Published on: 01/26/06
It may not be as glamorous as a title fight between King Kong and Godzilla, or even Godzilla and Mothra, but in the Georgia General Assembly, the National Rifle Association vs. the Georgia Chamber of Commerce comes pretty close.
Both groups are accustomed to getting what they want from state legislators, but in the case of House Bill 998, only one of them can win.
Under the bill, private employers would no longer be able to prevent their workers from bringing guns to the job and leaving them in the company parking lot. In fact, the proposed law would apply to any parking lot anywhere, with no exceptions for hospitals, prisons, churches or even schools. The bill is modeled after legislation passed in Oklahoma, and the NRA is now trying to push versions of the bill through state legislatures around the country.
On Wednesday, however, an estimated 75 members of the Georgia Chamber's Governmental Affairs Council voted unanimously to oppose HB 998, according to Joe Fleming, the chamber's senior vice president.
"That bill causes quite a bit of concern for our members," says Fleming. "The chamber is without question supportive of the Second Amendment, but our members see this primarily as a property rights issue."
HB 998 — co-sponsored by Republican state Reps. Earl Ehrhart of Powder Springs and Jan Jones of Alpharetta, among others — is not by any stretch of the imagination a Second Amendment issue.
Even under the NRA's expansive and at times ludicrous interpretation, the Second Amendment can only be said to bar government from restricting gun possession. It cannot be twisted to say that private property owners cannot bar guns from their property if they choose.
Furthermore, a study conducted in North Carolina and published last spring in the American Journal of Public Health found that workplaces that allowed possession of weapons were far more likely to be the site of a workplace murder than those that banned weapons.
"Workplaces where guns were specifically permitted were five to seven times more likely to be the site of a work homicide" compared to sites where all weapons were prohibited, the peer-reviewed study found.
In addition to HB 998, the NRA is backing a bill that would significantly lower the legal threshold for gun use in self-defense.
Georgia law has long honored the so-called "castle doctrine," which holds that your home is your castle and you have the right to defend it even with deadly force. However, Senate Bill 396 makes the whole world your castle. Someone who feels under attack "has no duty to retreat and has the right to meet force with force, including deadly force," the bill reads.
In other words, if you get in an argument with your neighbor and he threatens you with a baseball bat or even a fist, you are under no obligation to walk back into your house and call the police. You can plug him right there and call the police to pick up the body.
And sadly, that's not an example of how the law might be abused. That is instead exactly the type of behavior the bill was designed to legalize and even encourage.
Years ago, I interviewed Marion Hammer, who at the time was the NRA's vice president. A small, pleasant grandmotherly sort, Hammer said that on several different occasions she had been forced to pull a handgun to fend off a threat.
In the most recent incident, she said, she had brandished a pistol to fend off a perceived threat to herself and her daughters. But when she later found a police officer and explained what had happened, "He told me I was lucky he didn't arrest me," she said. "Arrest ME! Can you imagine?"
Somehow, yes I can. Most people go their entire lives without ever having to pull a gun; someone who had done so several times struck me as a little too eager to spray lead.
Hammer went on to become the NRA's first female president and is now a gun lobbyist at the Florida Legislature. In fact, she's one of the people credited with Florida's new "stand your ground" law, on which SB 396 is modeled.
However, there's no need for Georgia to mimic that madness. Under state law — and thanks to the common sense of our prosecutors, law enforcement and grand juries — law-abiding Georgians already have a lot of legal leeway to defend themselves. SB 396 would do nothing except make it more difficult to prosecute the overly trigger-happy among us.
