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In Local News — Why Now?
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In Local News

While in a waiting room I scanned my local “libertarian” puppy trainer, and their op ed was like the episode of Star Trek where Kirk causes the evil computer to self-destruct with a logical fallacy. The problem for the editorial board was the conflict between the right to bear arms and the rights of the property owner caused by Florida’s new “Take your howitzer to work” law. After wasting several inches of newsprint in a pong game between the Second and Fourth Amendments, they finally decided that they would side with the Fourth Amendment, because if you can’t violate the Bill of Rights on your own property, what’s it good for?

2 comments

1 Badtux { 04.21.08 at 1:02 pm }

Heh. Yeah, I spotted that little “issue” with the law early on. It’s amazing that people who supposedly “support property rights” get their panties in a bunch when property owners exercise said property rights to ban guns from their property.

Unfortunately(?), there are many similar laws on the books that also infringe on property rights, such as the one requiring the property owner to rent to a black family if the black family is the best qualified even if the property owner is a KKK member who hates blacks. While I agree with the public purpose of these civil rights laws, they do make a rather interesting precedent for other laws that infringe on the rights of property owners, such as the Take Your Cannon To Work law. Once you open up that “public purpose” wormhole, there’s no end to what you can throw into it…

-Badtux the semi-libertarian Penguin

2 Bryan { 04.21.08 at 3:43 pm }

The housing laws don’t kick in unless you have more than some magic number of rentals. It’s like California’s business laws that have different rules based on the number of people you employ. The employee that takes you to the next level is one expensive hire, more as a matter of time to fill out the extra paperwork, than hard cash. That one extra rental brings down the bureaucratic hoards on you.

My landlord, who is also a friend, is only interested in one color, green. If you pay the rent, you are fine by him. He has had more luck with “poor” people, than the “elite” who rent his condo on the Gulf.

This is really an insurance issue. The insurance companies have been pushing for the weapons ban, and there is a penalty in liability premiums if you don’t have one.