Employer requires gun ownership

Evaluating the impact of the concealed carry gun legislation in Minnesota is difficult. Some police departments, citing state law, refuse to say whether permitted weapons were used in shootings. And other departments don’t report defensive shootings to state officials, so the annual report of shootings involving crime stopped by someone carrying a gun is incomplete and, as a result, inaccurate.

But we can at least say a shooting in Brooklyn Park is a case of a permitted gun stopping a crime. The police said so.

Authorities haven’t released the name of the shooter or the would-be robber he killed, but we’ll mark it down as one for the law.

And this is the scenario which has led a business owner in Georgia to impose a requirement upon his employees: They all must carry guns.

“I said, ‘We’re all going to get firearms,’ and it was a unanimous, 100-percent participation, no dissenters whatsoever,” Lance Toland, who runs an insurance office, tells the Associated Press in a story today. “It’s about protection, No. 1, but it’s really about us as citizens of this great country enjoying and using our right to bear arms.”

But not the right not to?

Toland will buy guns for all of his employees and they’ll be required to take the proper gun safety classes.

“I have a number of offices and most of my employees are women,” he tells WSB in Atlanta.