Guns, Guns, More Guns

This month, for the third year in a row, Republicans in the Florida legislature passed a bill making it a crime for an employer to prohibit employees from bringing guns to work. If only the bill passes the state senate, we can all rest easy; the workplace will become safe hunting ground for the 26.2 percent of all Americans 18 or older who "suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year."

That's a whopping 57.7 million adults. And it doesn't even take into account the 80 Americans who die every day from gun violence. We shouldn't really count them. They were shot dead. Some of them probably were even guilty of something.

The "Shoot Up The Workplace" bill is one of those genius proposals of Northwest Florida representative Durrell Peaden, among others. Peaden apparently sees no more pressing need for improving life in Florida than to make the workplace in America a free fire zone.

Makes perfect sense. After all, where else are you more likely to want to kill someone? A recent Gallup poll found 77% of all Americans hate their jobs. As the blog at My Two Cents reasonably points out --

[I]f you have a hammer, all your problems look like nails.
If you have a gun, all your problems look like targets.

The bill is opposed by business interests "who think an employers' private property rights should be deemed at least as sacred as their employees' right to come to work armed." So it seems, as one south Florida newspaper editorialized, the debate is being framed as a clash between a Second Amendment right to carry guns versus a Fifth Amendment private property right.

What we'd like to know is why has the gun-lover's lobby stopped at undermining the Fifth Amendment? What weenies! Why not undermine Article I, Section 4 by prohibiting polling places from banning voter guns? Or, the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, by requiring that jurors carry guns?

Or that granddaddy of them all, the First Amendment? Let's make it a crime for churches to ban guns in the nave, the chancel, the entire sanctuary. And, cover Sunday School, too, and church-sponsored preschools.

Arm 'em to the teeth! After all, if guns are banned, only nuns and atheist kids will have guns!