20030902

Packing on private property
One of the thorny issues we struggle with in our examination of lawfully-regulated concealed carry of a weapon is what happens when the person carrying crosses some boundary between public property and private.

As a libertarian, I would agree as a matter of course that the owner of the private property has a right to decide whether to allow other persons to carry concealed on his property. That boundary blurs, though, when the private property happens to be a business open to the public, such as a video rental, grocer, department store, and so forth.

There's no expectation that the property owner will know each person, even a significant fraction of the people entering the property. And the owner per se is very likely a body of shareholders spread across the United States. I can't call it private property for the purpose of delineating who's allowed on the property, and whose presence armed or unarmed constitutes trespass.

Many state with licensed shall-issue concealed carry address this problem by requiring those places that want to exclude CCW to post a notice at each entrance. At least one state, hoping to reduce the number of businesses who would post such notices, specified the signage so it is big enough, and obnoxious enough, that few businesses would go to the trouble.

The gun-nut's wet dream is a civil suit against a business who posts, making the business jointly responsible for any injury or death suffered by a person who would have carried but didn't because the business told him or her not to. This approach leaves me cold, of course, because somebody is going to have to suffer an attack for the suit to go forward.

I propose instead the Courthouse approach. Courthouses and other government buildings are required in many States to provide secure storage for weapons.

Your video rental outlet doesn't want CCW on premises? OK fine, where's the locker? State law says you need one locker, 8 by 8 by 14 inches, for each 200 square feet of store space, and it has to be accessible to both the entrance and exit doors. You may charge a deposit for the locker key of no more than ten cents. A Target could handle it, piece of cake, because of how their doors are arranged.

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