If you enter one of Lance Toland’s insurance offices wanting to take out a policy, make sure that’s the only thing you want.
Take something else, and you may meet the Judge.
The Judge is a handgun. The weapon, whose name really is the Judge, is as much a part of Lance Toland Associates' work environment as the firm's laptops and phones. Each of Toland's 12 employees packs the Judge during office hours.
“It’s a hand cannon,” Toland said Tuesday afternoon, speaking from his home in Sea Island. “I would not walk into (one of the Toland offices) with anything but business on my mind.”
Manufactured by Taurus International Manufacturing Inc., the Judge handgun can chamber .410 shotgun shells as well as .45-caliber bullets. At close range — say, in an insurance office — it is devastating.
It is, Toland said, a nice insurance policy against someone who would harm his workers, who specialize in aviation coverage.
He decided last year that each worker ought to get a gun when one of his employees, who routinely carried a weapon, announced her retirement. “I said, ‘I think you need to think about protection,’” Toland recalled. He made them a deal: train in the use of handguns, then get a state permit to carry a weapon. Do that, he told his workers, and I’ll buy the guns.
They did, and he did. The agents at Toland Associates’ offices in Atlanta, Griffin and St. Simons Island now are armed with their own Judge. Each was eager to have the weapon, he said. “One asked me if it came in pink,” he said.
(For the record: Taurus offers a Judge with pink grips.)
He wishes his uncle had been armed when three men with a gun confronted him outside a Griffin convenience store nearly 40 years ago. For $20, Luther Thomas Toland lost his life. The deceased man’s nephew still grieves for him.
“I have an issue with thugs,” Toland, 61, said. “I want to make sure my family and my employees are protected.”
Kennesaw's elected officials sounded a comparable note more than 30 years ago when they passed an ordinance requiring heads of households to own at least one firearm with ammunition. The 1982 law generated headlines worldwide.
Guns have been a hot topic at the state Capitol this year, too. Just this week, the state House voted to legalize carrying concealed guns on Georgia's college campuses. That bill must now pass the Senate. A similar measure is already in place in Texas.
Toland is within his rights to require employees to be armed, said Lester Tate, a Cartersville lawyer who has handled a number of gun cases. Georgia, he said, is an “employment-at-will” state, meaning employers are free to hire or fire workers so long as they don’t violate anti-discrimination laws. Employees, he added, are free to leave, too.
“If you’re an employer and you want to require (workers) to wear yellow ties, you can do it,” Tate said. “He has the right to require employees to carry a gun. But once he requires them to carry a gun, he’s responsible for anything they do with it.”
Toland is OK with that. “This is a dialogue about responsible gun ownership and stewardship of our Second Amendment rights,” said Toland. The Second Amendment of the Constitution reads, in part, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Nor will his workers’ security be imperiled, Toland said. “I don’t want that to happen on my watch,” he said.
Insurance agent Andrea Van Buren is confident it won't. Every day, Van Buren picks up the Judge and brings it to Toland Associates' Atlanta office, opposite DeKalb Peachtree Airport. She also keeps a Glock handgun ready.
“It was nice to get,” said Van Buren, who already had a license to carry a weapon when she started work in January. “You get an office computer, and you get an office gun.”
The presence of handguns in the office hasn’t scared off any customers, said Van Buren. She’s not sure if they’ve chased off any bad guys — but the firepower certainly might have, had a criminal bothered to look.
“The Judge is on the desk,” she said. “The Glock is on my hip.”
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