Companies Fight Law Allowing Guns at Work
Dec. 3, 2004 — -- If you and your co-workers could bring guns to work and keep them nearby, would that make you safer?
That is the idea behind an Oklahoma law that went into effect Nov. 1, requiring employers to allow their workers to bring guns to work and leave them in their locked cars in the parking lot.
Three companies -- Whirlpool, The Williams Cos. and ConocoPhillips -- filed suit in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, claiming the law is unconstitutional because it violates their property rights. Whirlpool has since dropped out of the suit.
According to the Oct. 29 filing by Williams' and ConocoPhillips' attorneys, the new law violates the companies' rights under the U.S. and Oklahoma constitutions because it "effectively takes or damages their real property and/or property rights without due process of law."
The law is written as a series of amendments to the Oklahoma Firearms Act and the Oklahoma Self-Defense Act, and says in part that "no person, property owner, tenant, employer or business entity shall be permitted to establish any policy or rule that has the effect of prohibiting any person, except a convicted felon, from transporting and storing firearms in a locked vehicle on any property set aside for any vehicle."
But one of the co-authors of the bill, state Sen. Frank Shurden, a Democrat, said that what was at issue was the safety of the workers, especially those who travel to or from work at off hours.
Violence in the workplace is an issue that has periodically gained national attention, with mass killings that draw intense media coverage. But those crimes are relatively uncommon, and according to an FBI report issued in the spring of this year, workplace violence is not.
A Justice Department study cited in the FBI report put the number of "violent victimizations" suffered in the workplace at more than 1.7 million per year, with the cost to businesses running "into many billions of dollars."
Of the roughly 900 workplace killings each year, nearly 80 percent are committed by people who have no connection with the business, usually during the course of a robbery, according to the government report. The rest are roughly evenly divided between those committed by those for who a company provides service, by an employee or former employee against co-workers, or by someone who has a personal relationship with an employee.
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