For years liability concerning harms resulting from the consumption of alcohol has been a subject of debate. Not liquor stores and spousal abuse, but bars and patrons. Homeowners and their guests.
If you “overserve” and allow them to leave, keys in hand, someone might come looking to milk you if harms result.
I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet, but I like these thought experiments. So, do those insisting on gun-free zones have any liability for harm if you can’t defend yourself?
In the Granite State, we protect your right to open or conceal-carry a firearm. Anyone who can legally buy, own or possess one can carry it in all but a very few places. It gives the progressive luminaries, and their ideological baggage train fits from politicians who want to defund the police while disarming you (because we have police) to shop-owners and even school administrators who can’t abide the notion of self-defense with a firearm.
The hoplophobes say, no guns, please (Dammit!).
The enumerated natural right to self-defense disturbs them. They’d be fine burning down a minority business in the name of black lives or watching Antifa shoot a black man for defending that property (especially if they happen to vote Republican), but not you, not on their holy ground ever.
But then that’s what concealed carry is all about, yes? The knowledge that someone might be armed and trained to shoot back almost anywhere you are allowed to be. And these gun-free-zone-sign folks still benefit from the perception because many law-abiding citizens ignore the sign. After all, criminals ignore the sign.
We’ll call that equity.
Absent a right to self-defense (or the perception of opposing force equal or greater than their own), criminals would seek to have their way with anyone who didn’t have Joe’s F-15s (or nukes), and that’d be a lot of folks. You just need to be bigger or more numerous than the target, and the success of your lawlessness increases (another term for this is Democracy).
But the hoplophobes have been programmed to fear individuals more than governments, so they post signs declaring some geographic space or location a gun-free zone. A sign (as previously noted) that no criminal will ever obey, so back to my thought experiment.
If you think we should be able to sue a homeowner or a restaurant for letting someone leave under the influence of alcohol which then causes damage to property or life, why not those who establish gun-free zones in a state or nation whose highest law enumerates the right you’ve denied?
Maybe even your local, county, or state government.
At least on paper, those Constitution things are the highest law of the land. And yes, I get the whole thing about private property and honoring the wishes of those who “own” it, but they don’t truly own it, do they? The government is letting them live there. The landlord who holds the lease owns it as long as they pay their taxes. You can transfer it to someone else and make some money, which the government will tax. And while you may have certain rights to your property on the property, if you don’t pay taxes, the government may try to take both, thus the need for a second amendment.
There is no criminal greater than the State and one of many reasons why the pro-government crowd wants you disarmed, but that’s not the point of this discussion. It’s a what-if kind of thing. What if people who posted gun-free zone signs in a state like New Hampshire could be legally liable for injuries resulting from an inability to carry and defend yourself?
If you did carry and you caused injury, damage, or death, you’d be responsible, so why not the other way around?
