Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
This seems like a sensible balancing of rights.
It’s already the law that a business owner owes his customers a duty of care (to make sure the floors aren’t slippery, for example). If you, as the business owner, invite me to your place of business but prevent me from protecting myself therein, this proposed law says you have assumed an additional duty of care to protect me.
You could fulfill the additional duty through armed guards, for example, but you cannot neglect the additional duty that you voluntarily assumed, leaving me unprotected. If you do neglect your additional duty and I get hurt when I could have defended myself, you should pay.
Naturally, the insurance company will have a say in setting your premiums . . . .
Joe Doakes
When liability insurance is allowed to account for all liability, we’ll see some sense come to that side of the debate.
Hint: Joe’s right.
I dunno about this. Where does the decision to take responsibility for your own safety by not going into a self-defense free zone come in?
This smacks of using lawyers to force Private property owners to knuckle under. I’m not a fan.
Besides, seems to me that if a guy was properly concealing his pistol, those signs are more of a suggestion than an order.
I would say that if you ban 2nd amendment rights in your establishment, that alone would not require you to hire armed guards.
But if you live in a higher crime area, and criminals are targeting establishments, say bars, that have the “no guns allowed” signs up, is that a case where you have created something similar to an attractive nuisance?
The difference would be between a bookstore in Mankato banning guns vs a bar on West 7th Street or St Paul’s east side advertising that they ban firearms.
I would suggest that the market has a solution for this. If a business posts, I try not to do business with them. Sometimes I will send a note saying that if you tell the world that I am defenseless, I won’t be showing up with my dollars.
Swiftee catches the objection rightly; if I believe that the signs make a place more dangerous, I have a responsibility to avoid shopping there. And I take that responsibility seriously.