I find it interesting that companies seem to think that they somehow have control of your civil rights just because you perform work for them. Conduct matters should be relegated to actions by the employees, not attempting to define a utopian work place... and the Constitution doesn't stop at the front door of a business.
I work for a communications company, and we've had to call the police on a regular basis. We have a "no firearms" policy too, and LOTS of people violate it every day. They actually try to enforce a policy of "no firearms in your car" in a parking lot they don't own... but I digress.
The company personnel manual demands that if the company suspects you of any kind of personal misbehavior, that they have the right to search your person and your car. Of course, when I read that, my blood boiled... so I sent them a memo, for their "justification" for the unreasonable search was that to refuse was insubordination.
I spelled out to them that if they put their hands on me physically, whoever did so would be charged with assault. I would allow them to look inside any briefcase, desk or a box, or anything of that sort that I carried, but if they put their hands on me, I was charging them with assault. Then the argument went to "searching my car"... to which I told them, you're welcome to open the doors and look inside my car. If you open anything inside the car, you have to have a search warrant and have me charged with a crime... and they don't issue search warrants based on company policy, so if you are accusing me of a crime and all you find is a gun in my car, you better have plenty of money for the lawsuit to follow, because I have a CCW permit.
I told them if I carried my gun into the building, they couldn't do anything about it other than fire me, even though they have the building marked with "no concealed weapons" signs at the door. I won't reveal to them what their discrepancy is, but the signs they have do not comply with the state law, and they don't have them posted properly. Like everything else, they simply think that posting a sign complies with explicit legal restrictions.
It's a contentious relationship, but I put them on notice that if they started playing games with my job, they'd be in federal court. I had a long talk with my lawyer before any of this occurred, and he told me what I could and couldn't do, so I've followed his guidelines explicitly... and if they fire me without cause, they'll not only be going to court, but somebody's going to jail.
In South Carolina, it's a misdemeanor crime to fire somebody because of their political opinion... and the 2nd Amendment is a hot political issue... so anything related to my assertion of my 2nd amendment rights is a "political opinion"... regardless of what their policy manual says, and I'd draft an arrest warrant in a skinny minute.
We work in a building that is almost solid glass on the ground floor, and have unarmed security guards that are perfect targets sitting at their security desk just inside the glass doors. The company's "emergency plans" are almost non-existant, even though they have reams of policy manual "write ups"... they never adopt anything that is usable, so they're also liable for not providing a safe place to work if they have an incident.
We've had people who were fired to show up on the 2nd and 3rd floors to confront their former supervisors, totally bypassing the security by simply walking in with someone who had a security badge to open the door... so it's just a matter of time before it goes sour and somebody gets hurt. Police response time is usually about 10 minutes to our location... so if you expand that out to actually "handling the situation", you're looking at a half hour to 45 minutes before they could lock the building down and isolate the threat.
We had a fire drill and blocked one of the exits, and it took nearly 18 minutes to empty the building because the people kept trying to go down the blocked stairwell, and refused to follow directions to go to the other stairwell. How well do you think they would respond in a shooting situation, especially if they had to cross the field of fire to get to the exit?
I worked in a chemical plant once where we had guns in locked boxes in the supervisor's offices, and a "two-key" system to get them in case of an emergency. One key was kept by managers, and one by security... and it took both keys to acquire the weapon... which was a very reasonable security provision. Nobody carried a gun, but they were easily accessible in an emergency situation.
I hate that you lost your job over carrying a gun into your job, but if you worked in a bar, it was illegal for you to do anyway... so you're lucky the manager didn't turn that over to the police. For sure, I wouldn't make any noise about it. As long as your gun was in the car, you were legal... when it passed through the door of a place that sells alcohol in S.C., you were in violation of state law... and your bar owner could lose his liquor license over it. While we have pretty good gun llaws in S.C., they've long realized that guns and alcohol don't mix... and there are places where you can't carry, even with a CCW permit. Places that serve alcohol are one of them.
I hope you find something soon, and that it's somewhere that you won't be confronted on a daily basis by idiots... especially drunk ones. We get our share of both drunks and idiots, but luckily, they are usually confined to our front counter area, and not in the company area where the employees work.
There's lots of other jobs out there that don't put you in jeopardy, so find one and leave the gun out of it as much as possible. Every time you pick one up and aren't at a shooting range or on your own property, you're stepping into the criminal justice system. How you fare there is a jump ball.
WT
