Iowa is considering becoming the twenty-fifth state to enact a law compelling private property owners to allow guns on their premises. The laws take various forms, often prohibiting employers, retailers, or organizations more generally from maintaining a no-guns-on-premises rule. Some bans apply only in specified narrow circumstances (e.g., in employee parking lots as regards locked firearms in car trunks) and some are broader.
As Cato adjunct scholar Ilya Somin argues, these laws infringe on owners’ property rights, do not advance authentic Second Amendment liberties, and often interfere with legitimate customer and co-worker interests. He makes the case in a new Duke Center for Firearms Law piece, along with a related op-ed and Volokh Conspiracy blog posts:
These laws do not defend constitutional rights. I support strong Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms, but the amendment constrains only the government. It does not require private individuals to own guns or allow them on their land… In that respect, it is similar to other provisions of the Bill of Rights. For example, the First Amendment does not require private owners to allow on their land every kind of speech protected against censorship by the state….
Scholars and courts have long recognized that the right to exclude people and objects of which they disapprove is a central element of property owners’ rights.
These laws are also typically one-size-fits-all affairs that ignore the diversity to be found among employers and property owners in a free society. “Owners of shelters that serve victims of domestic violence, for example, sometimes forbid guns — including in the parking lot — to reassure their understandably fearful clients.” Other employers may have a history of violence on the premises or want to leave security to their own hired guards, even though they have nothing against guns in principle. Yet other owners “may be staunch adherents of a philosophy of nonviolence; such autonomy deserves respect, even if you disagree with their views.” (Some of the laws apply even to churches.)
Have some gun control advocates hyped and misrepresented the efficacy of so-called gun-free zones? Sure. So what? That’s no excuse for depriving an unrelated group of citizens, most of which have made no such representations, of their rights.
Somin notes that the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid opens a possible avenue for some of these laws to be challenged under the Constitution as a taking of property without compensation. Cedar Point, which arose from a California law requiring farm operators to admit union organizers to their land, established that prolonged unwelcome occupation of a business’s property can count as a compensable taking under the Fifth Amendment even if it is not permanent and leaves no physical damage.
“Sadly,” Somin notes, “the imposition of mandatory gun-access laws on property owners is part of a more general turn against private property rights by many conservatives, in recent years.” That unfortunate retreat from dedication to one of the central mainstays of individual rights is, alas, a matter nowadays of daily headlines.
