PSH in Progress

I was just going to let the story about the Des Moines Pizza Hut driver go. I don’t eat their pizza since they opened a Papa Murphy’s near my house, so my threat to boycott them would be inconsequential.

But the usually semi-reasonable Kevin Drum had to flip into Pants Shitting Hysterics while posting about Glenn Reynolds’ comment on the story, as well as give his readers the opportunity to show off their disregard for civil rights.

I guess this is the aspect of the gun rights crowd that perplexes me the most. It’s easy to understand their view of the Second Amendment (a view that I partly share), and it’s easy to understand, in general, their view that citizens should be free to own guns if they want to. But this Wild West mentality is much harder to fathom. Do they really think that, for example, pizza delivery guys should routinely wear sidearms and engage in gun battles with crooks, and that employers should (apparently) have no right to prevent it? Frankly, given the average age and disposition of pizza delivery guys, I’d just as soon not have a city full of sidearmed pizza deliverers, and Pizza Hut would probably just as soon not get sued when one of these guys ends up shooting someone who stiffed him on the bill or got into an argument over whether he ordered anchovies on his pie. What’s more, Pizza Hut is in the business of making money, and I imagine that most of their customers would prefer not to deal with a company that sends armed young men to their door. Being responsive to all these issues is just sensible corporate and public policy.

My employer can restrict my speech on the job, can fire me without due process, and is not required to cater to my every religious belief. Likewise, they can also have rules preventing employees from carrying arms at work — and most of them do. The occasional angry postal worker to the contrary, workplaces would almost certainly be more dangerous on average if there were lots of loaded guns around, and surely employers have every right to make that assessment. Right?

Wow! Bringing up the “Wild West” card, the “unhinged gun owner” card, and the “Going Postal” card in just two paragraphs.

It gets even more bigoted in his comments section.

My place of employ is in a not-so-nice section of South Seattle. I work there at night, by myself. My first manager was a reasonable man (aka: Retired Marine Captain), and took into account my lack of a criminal background, my Concealed Pistol License and my history with the company and said I could make the call as to whether I wanted to provide for my own protection.

The subsequent managers, counting the current one, are not so reasonable.

Will they pay my medical bills/funeral costs if I am assaulted on the job? No.

Is it their property to regulate as to who and what gets brought onto it? Surely.

Are they being reasonable? Absolutely not.

Everyone is different. Jobs themselves, are different. I could name a dozen people I work with whom I wouldn’t let be in the same room with a firearm. I could name the same number of whom I would want at my back when times get tough.

The managers know who is competent and who is not, but either they’re bigots themselves (the manager prior to the current one), or they refuse to vary from the Corporate Manual.

When the last go-around of Teamsters’ attempting to get the office folks to go union, I told them that if they could get a process into the contract where I could get “reviewed” so as to be allowed to arm myself, I would switch my swing vote. They must not have wanted to grab the office very badly, since their answer the next morning was “Nope. No Way.”

But I worry very little. I have alternate plans.