Honestly I’d never thought about this until recently.
I firmly, completely and totally believe that the 2nd amendment insures my personal right to have a gun.
I realize that there are those who would disagree. Fine, that demonstrates yet another freedom we have in this country. The freedom to think for ourselves, do what we believe to be right and hopefully pursue our own personal happiness.
Your choice not to have a gun is as personal to you as my belief in upholding the 2nd amendment is to me. I’m totally good with that because we’re both pursuing our respective forms of happiness.
When you’re looking for a job and thinking about relocation, you start considering all the factors that moving your stuff from one place to another entails. You start making a packing list. That list has the stuff that you’d need immediately and the stuff that you could leave in storage, or have shipped.
If one of those items happened to be a gun, now you have to consider your destination.
A responsible gun owner would be far more inclined to keep the gun or guns in a safe and would be hesitant to let that safe and it’s contents get too far out of their control.
The gun owners I know don’t want to ever have the possibility of one of their weapons being stolen.
Problem is a gun safe is pretty damn obvious going onto a moving truck or coming off of one. It’s not like you’d be able to be subtle about a 900lb safe that’s labeled “American Guns Safe” .
This is especially true if you’re wheeling it into your new digs with the help of 20 day workers.
My luck would have me moving into a house between a cop and a liberal do gooder who felt it necessary to report to authorities that they’d seen GUNS!!! and ammunition being wheeled into the house…
I’d never really thought about it too much…
Mainly because I’ve always assumed my business was well… my business. Since we didn’t live in Nazi Germany or the USSR I never worried about my neighbors tattling on me.
Well that is until now, thanks in part to the newspaper in New York publishing gun permit owners names & addresses. I was surprised that anyone sided with the paper thinking it was OK for the public at large to know what you had in your home.
Of course the excuse of “the Children” was trotted out as a justification for invasion of privacy.
Personally I think, “The Children” are at far more risk from sexual deviants than guns.
In the interest of protecting The Children, perhaps we should make everyone purchasing vibrators, leather restraints, or pornography register these materials then publish their names and addresses weekly.
That is after all the conflation the Journal News was trying to make with their gun ownership map. They were drawing a parallel between gun ownership and sexual molesters.
Which brings me to the question.
If you were to be offered a position in New York for instance or Massachusetts or Illinois… what do you do with your guns?
Both New York and Massachusetts are insane about their regulation, permitting, registration, and god only knows what all else.
I’ve been told that these states also make a lot of additional money from anyone choosing to exercise their 2nd amendment right. Something on the order of hundreds if not thousands of dollars just to get the permit that allows you to exercise your constitutionally guaranteed right
This mountain of bureaucratic nonsense probably isn’t about protecting the public as much as it is about discouraging all but the hardiest or masochistic of individuals from obtaining or keeping weapons legally.
I could probably head to Harlem or some of the less savory neighborhoods in Boston and obtain a weapon in 30 minutes or less with the right amount of money. No papers, no background check, no reporting or waiting periods either.
And were you to land a job in Chicago (A safest place on Earth Gun Free Zone…) well I suppose you’d have to sell your guns…
A job transfer to Chicago would , I guess mean you’d have to go to one of those unsavory areas and sell your guns, associated ammo, and any accessories, the day you got there.
Again without background checks or any reports on to whom you sold the weapons.
Then you could go to your new apartment and lay your head down to sleep in peace knowing that you’d done the right thing and complied with the law.
Sarcasm aside, I realized that there are in fact places in this country where I absolutely will not even consider moving.
I don’t want an arsenal, I don’t want mil spec weapons. But I damn sure do want the right to own guns, and I want the ability to go to the store put my money on the counter and buy a rifle, or ammunition
So I’ve altered my job search / willingness to relocate parameters.
I’ve also responded “No” to an invitation to apply for a 6 month position in NY with the following:
Thank you for thinking of me.However, I do not wish to move to a state like NY where I must for the most part forego my 2nd Amendment right to keep & bear arms, and where I also would be subject to the loss of personal privacy about the contents of my home.All the best.
Perhaps fighting gun control isn’t all about fighting with law in the courts.
Perhaps it’s about fighting oppressive laws in the economic arena too.
After all if companies can’t get employees or lose business because their corporate offices are in gun control states they’ll move somewhere else.
All that has to happen is for their employees to be honest when they leave, and for their prospective employees to be honest about why they’re not interviewing for positions.
It’s the long way around but it does make a statement.
