"It does not take a majority to prevail. What it takes is an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
-- Samuel Adams
We at GOUtah! are not lawyers. We're just regular guys. We interpret legislation and existing laws to the best of our ability as interested laymen. However, if you have any questions about a law, we encourage you to consult a properly credentialed attorney.
Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, from House District 58, has authored a bill numbered HB 357. We really like this bill. Our reading of the bill is that it does two main things:
First, HB 357 would make it legal for you to keep an unloaded firearm in the glove compartment of your car without having a concealed-weapon permit, provided that you’re legally in possession of the gun (i.e., it’s not stolen, you aren’t prohibited by state or federal law from owning it, etc.) Under current law, as we understand it, you can’t keep a firearm (either loaded or unloaded) in your glove compartment unless you have a valid concealed-weapon permit. Because of the state’s definition of "unloaded", as we understand it, HB 357 would allow you to keep, for example, a semiautomatic handgun containing a full magazine in the glove compartment, as long as there isn’t a round in the chamber, and you would be able to do so without a permit.
All six states that adjoin Utah already allow this (according to our interpretation of their laws), and none of those states have reported any problems arising from allowing legally possessed firearms to be kept in the glove compartment without a permit. Furthermore, at least four of these states apparently allow the weapon to be kept loaded without a permit. Thus, Utah's current prohibition against this sort of thing is behind the times and, in our view, inappropriate for a state in the Mountain West. The states adjoining Utah are Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Second, HB 357 would improve the law regulating where one can carry a loaded and/or concealed firearm without a permit. Current state law allows you to carry a loaded firearm without a permit at your place of residence. However, the firearm can’t be concealed. HB 357 would change this, making it legal to carry a loaded and/or concealed firearm without a permit at your place of residence, with the usual caveats that the gun has to be legal, you aren’t prohibited from owning a gun, etc. Furthermore, HB 357 would expand the law to include any real property that you own. Thus, for example, if you own a farm or a ranch or if you own a rental property or a retail property, you’ll be able to legally carry a loaded and/or concealed firearm on that property without a permit.
GOUtah! supports HB 357, which has been sent to the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee. We’ll keep you posted as to what you can do to help get this bill passed.
SB 78, sponsored by Sen. Mark Madsen from Senate District 13, is designed to modify the state’s liability law in order to strongly discourage employers from enacting parking-lot gun bans (policies that prohibit employees from keeping firearms locked in their cars in the company parking lot). GOUtah! supports this bill.
The bill’s provisions also apply to a number of other types of parking lots, such as those used by customers of retail businesses and tenants of apartment buildings. GOUtah! supports SB 78. The good news is that this bill has 18 co-sponsors in the Senate, out of a total of 26 Senators. The bill recently passed out of the Senate Business and Labor Committee with a unanimous vote. We expect that the bill will pass on the floor of the Senate. Our main concern will be to get it through the House, which is where it died last year.
Your concealed-firearm permit is valid everywhere in Utah, except for specific places designated in the Utah Code such as airport terminals, the secure area of a mental hospital or prison, a house of worship with a posted no-gun policy, etc. Your permit, where valid, exempts you from the state’s restrictions on the carrying of loaded weapons and the carrying of concealed weapons. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t get into trouble of one sort or another for carrying a weapon with a permit, even in a place where it’s legal to do so under state law. For example, the Federal Government has its own laws and regulations that apply to certain federal properties such as Post Offices, military bases, federal buildings, etc. Although, your permit is valid in a post office (meaning that it exempts you from the state’s prohibition on the carrying of loaded and concealed weapons), the U.S. Postal Service can cause a lot of trouble for you if they catch you with a gun in a post office, even if you have a valid Utah concealed-weapon permit. Until recently, you could be fined by the U.S. National Park Service for carrying a concealed firearm in a national park in Utah, even with a valid permit.
Furthermore, quite a few private employers have company policies that prohibit weapons in the workplace. Unless you work inside a gun-free zone designated in the Utah Code (such as, for example, the secure area of a mental hospital), your concealed-firearm permit is generally valid in the workplace. Your valid permit exempts you from the state’s prohibition on the carrying of loaded and concealed weapons. Which means that you’re not violating state law by carrying at work. However, your permit does not grant you immunity from the wrath of your employer in the form of firing or disciplinary action.
Because of these sorts of workplace gun bans, many employees with concealed-weapon permits leave their guns locked in their cars while they’re at work. This way, they can at least have access to their self-defense weapons on their way to and from work, during their lunch hour, etc. And, of course, many people without concealed-weapon permits may wish to store a gun in their car in a legal manner and for lawful purposes. Unfortunately, a significant number of companies have gone so far in recent years as to threaten employees with firing or disciplinary action if they get caught leaving a firearm in their car, even if the firearm is legally possessed and even if it’s hidden from view and the car is locked.
Ultimately, the reason for most of these sorts of harebrained corporate policies is that employment laws and liability laws are so complicated nowadays that many small and mid-sized companies don’t want to draft their own employment policies. So they outsource the whole business of corporate policy writing to one of several large East-Coast consulting firms that specialize in this sort of thing. Most of these consulting firms have armies of lawyers who continually draft and revise corporate policies in order to minimize the chance of lawsuits against the company. Such firms tend to err on what they believe to be the side of caution, and are, in any event, staffed largely by East-Coast hoplophobes (people with an irrational fear of weapons). So their default tendency is to assume that anything having to do with guns is bad and dangerous, and that any presence of guns on company property is an accident or a lawsuit or a shooting spree waiting to happen. That’s just how these people think, unfortunately.
Large companies often have their own policy-generating departments at their national headquarters, but these, too, tend to be staffed by the same sorts of people.
Consequently, thousands of permit-holders in Utah have to choose between obeying company policy (which makes them defenseless during their commute or while they’re out and about during the workday) or violating company policy by leaving a firearm locked in their car and hoping that the boss doesn’t find out about it.
SB 78 is designed to change all this. It explicitly exempts an employer from liability for misuse of a firearm kept in a car if the company allows people to keep legally possessed guns in their cars in the company parking lot. The company may choose to require that the car be kept locked and that the gun be kept hidden from view. Alternatively, if the company simply cannot tolerate firearms in its parking lot, the company has the option of erecting a security fence around the parking lot with a manned entry-point and a gun-storage locker outside the entry point. A company that does not comply with one of these two options will, under SB 78, lose its immunity from liability in the event that a firearm gets misused. In addition, a company that does not comply with the terms of SB 78 can held liable for damages if sued by someone who uses that parking lot. The bill also grants authority to the Utah Attorney General to directly sue a company that violates the terms of SB 78, even if no user of the parking lot brings a suit against the company.
In short, SB 78 would essentially reverse the current liability regime with regard to guns that are legally kept in parked cars, and would pull the rug out from under the lawyers who create corporate employment policies, giving them a strong incentive to eliminate parking-lot gun bans. And if an employer maintains a parking-lot ban out of concerns for security, they would have to provide a manned security perimeter with a secure weapons-storage facility at the entrance. Some high-security businesses, such as oil refineries, already have such secured parking areas, and SB 78 would simply require that they add a secure-storage facility at the entrance to the parking lot, where employees and visitors could store their weapons.
SB 78, in addition to applying to employers, would apply to owners and operators of most types of parking lots in a similar way (retail businesses, apartment buildings, etc.) SB 78 does not apply to private residential driveways or other types of parking areas associated with single-family homes, duplexes, etc., nor does it apply to parking lots operated by religious organizations.
It should be noted that a similar law was passed in 2004 in Oklahoma with help from the NRA. This law was overturned in court, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed the lower court’s ruling and ruled in favor of the Oklahoma law.
According to The Missoulian, the Montana State House of Representatives recently passed (by a vote of 64-36) a bill that exempts firearms and ammunition from federal gun laws if they are made and used within the state. This is really some pretty exciting stuff in our opinion. No Brady background checks. No BATFE forms to fill out. No FFL required to be a dealer, as long as you sell guns in Montana that were made in Montana. Of course, we don’t expect the Feds to necessarily go along with this. But passing a state law that overrides federal law under certain circumstances is a great start, and could make for some interesting federal court cases.
The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Most federal gun-control laws are flimsily based on this interstate commerce clause. The theory behind the Montana bill is that a gun that's made, sold, and used within the state of Montana is not involved in interstate commerce and is therefore exempt from federal gun laws. It will be interesting to see whether this bill passes the Montana Senate and gets signed by the Governor. We hope it does.
[Click here to see the article.]
Please take a moment to communicate with your Utah State Senator and encourage him to vote for SB 78, the parking lot bill. Although we expect a majority of senators to vote for this bill, it would be good for the bill’s supporters in the Senate to receive moral support and to be able to say that they’ve heard from constituents in favor of it, and it would also be good for the bill to pass by the widest possible margin in the Senate in order to give it greater momentum in the House.
[Pre-Written Letter re. SB 78]
Utah State Senate
320 State Capitol
P.O. Box 145115
Salt Lake City, Utah 84114
Phone: (801)538-1035
Fax for Republican senators: (801)326-1475
Fax for Democratic senators: (801)326-1476
To find your Senator’s e-mail address, and home phone [Click here.]
On 18 February 2009 our friends at Gun Owners of America (GOA) posted the following email alert.
It was a day that will live in infamy.
President Obama traveled to Denver, Colorado yesterday to sign the multi-billion dollar, pork-laden, so-called "stimulus" bill into law.
But forget the $787 billion price tag you heard on TV. Forget the $12 TRILLION debt limit which the bill created.
By the time debt services and other frills of the "socialism bill" are accounted for, the cost will be over $3,000,000,000,000 (yes, three TRILLION).
This makes the bill the biggest government spending grab in human history.
But what about the details? The hundreds and hundreds of pages in the bill were not made available until less than 18 hours before the final passage vote. But here's what we know in relation to the gun-related provisions:
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was at least honest when he said it would be a shame to let a crisis like the current recession "go to waste." Like vultures picking on the nation's carcass, the White House has used the nation's pain to lavish largesse on its political supporters, at the expense of the nation's economic survival.
And, in the end, this act of ethical depravity was made possible by every Democrat Senator who voted for the bill, plus the defections of three Republicans: Arlen Specter (R-PA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Susan Collins (R-ME).
If there is one silver lining to all of this, it's the debunking of a rumor that recently swept across the internet. The rumor claimed that the provisions of HR 45 -- the massive gun registration bill introduced by Chicago congressman Bobby Rush (D) -- were "rolled into" what was passed.
But having searched the contents of the new law, GOA staff has determined the rumor appears to be false.
Date:
From:
To:
Dear Senator :
As one of your constituents, I encourage you to support SB 78, Senator Madsen’s parking lot bill. This bill would modify the state’s liability laws to encourage employers to allow employees to keep legally possessed firearms locked and hidden from view inside their motor vehicles in the parking lot.
Thanks for taking time to consider my views on this bill.
Sincerely,
That concludes the GOUtah! Political and Legislative Alert #314 for 22 February 2009. We hope this information will be of assistance to you in defending your firearms rights.
Remember that getting this information is meaningless unless You Act On It Today. If you just read it and dump it in the trash, your gun rights, and the gun rights of future generations go in the trash with it. Get involved, get active and get vocal!
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