In the wake of this week’s shooting at a FedEx facility near Kennesaw, gun-rights advocates complained that things would have turned out differently if a security guard at the site had been armed, and if FedEx had allowed its employees to carry personal weapons.
“We call on the Georgia General Assembly to eliminate all ‘gun-free zones’ in Georgia, and for private businesses with anti-gun policies to eliminate them at once,” Patrick Parsons, executive director of Georgia Gun Owners, said in a statement. “How many more have to be injured or die before we let law-abiding Georgians have the right to defend themselves at all times?”
“It’s real unfortunate they didn’t allow those security guards to be armed,” said Russell Brannen, father-in-law of the wounded guard. “Chris [Sparkman] didn’t stand a chance. The guy blew through the back door. The scales are tipped in the wrong direction when the security guard can’t carry a sidearm. Had he been armed, he might have been able to stop the other five from being shot.”
That argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Using the situation as described by Brannen, it assumes a guard not trained to police standards, armed with a holstered handgun and under surprise attack by an assailant who burst in on him with shotgun blazing, had time to assess the situation, pull his weapon, aim it accurately and fire.
I’m sorry, that is not a realistic scenario. Such claims grossly underestimate the speed with which such incidents play out, the panic and confusion that ensue, and the difficulty of responding effectively even for highly trained law enforcement, which Sparkman is not.
In fact, Loretta Worters, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, told the AJC’s Mike Kanell that insurance companies typically charge companies higher premiums when they use armed security. Companies don’t base such decisions on political rhetoric or “liberal” sentiment. They assess risk — that’s how they make their money. And their risk assessments say that in most cases, an armed guard is more likely to be a danger than a protection.
The argument that legislators ought to force FedEx and other companies to drop their ban on weapons in the workplace is even more irrational, particularly when the argument is made in the name of “liberty” and safety. Peer-reviewed research has found that homicides are five to seven times more likely in workplaces that allow personal firearms.
It’s not hard to see why. The gunman in the FedEx shooting, Geddy Kramer, was a FedEx employee. One of Kramer’s coworkers has talked of an earlier workplace confrontation in which Kramer kept shining a laser in her eye. Kramer refused her repeated requests to stop, so she reported him to management.
Now let’s add a firearm to that situation. What if Kramer had a pistol strapped to his hip when his co-worker demanded that he stop pointing the laser at her? What about the supervisor who would have had to call an armed employee into his or her office to discuss a disciplinary problem? Workplace disputes — between co-workers, between employees and management — happen all the time. Adding firearms to those situations would be plain dumb.
FedEx, with some 300,000 employees worldwide, is by all accounts a well-run company, and its leadership has decided that risks of that type far outweigh any perceived benefit of allowing its employees to be armed. The fact that some are even debating whether to strip them of that authority tells you how far off the deep end we’ve gone on this topic.
