NRA has undertaken the effort to protect gun owners' rights in their workplaces by fighting efforts by employers to ban firearms, including firearms locked in private vehicles in employee parking lots. This has generated the predictable response from the anti-gun community, with claims of workplace horrors assigned to firearms and "studies" that purport to show firearms are a threat to workplace safety. Careful examinations of these studies reveal both bias in their source material and serious flaws in their methodology.

These studies--and the activists who quote them--completely fail to take into account that the majority of workplace homicides are directly related to another crime, most often robbery. Anti-gunners and their corporate allies purposely mislead by implying that all workplace homicides involve disgruntled employees. The truth is, studies conducted by both the U.S. Department of Labor and the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that between 75 and 82% of workplace homicides occur in connection with a robbery--seven to eight times the number that involve fellow employees.¹

One study relied on by anti-gunners and the media was published in the American Journal of Public Health.² (Although it was published in May 2005, the data it uses was collected in the mid 1990s and was originally published in 2002.³ )

• The study only included incidents in North Carolina, which the initial study admitted "may not be applicable to some other areas."
• The authors say they "hypothesized that policies allowing guns in the workplace may increase the risk of homicide for workers." But then they admit that they ignored the workplace circumstances of the crime: "Although we collected data on workplace experience with robbery and violent crime, we did not control for it in the models presented here . . ."
• The study failed to account for the crucial issue of cause and effect. The authors found that there were more homicides in workplaces that allow employees to possess guns, but they failed to examine why guns were allowed. The 2002 study also found that there were more homicides in workplaces that had video cameras in place. Should that lead researchers to deduce that the presence of video cameras are a risk factor for homicide? Or is it more logical to assume that video cameras are installed in workplaces already at a high risk?

  The same logic applies to workplace policies on employee possession of firearms. It is logical to ask if guns were allowed because these workplaces were at high risk for robberies. The North Carolina data (which shows that 60% of the homicides were robbery-related) seems to support this position, but it does not appear that the researchers considered this possibility.

• They also fail to provide data on the question of whether the employees were actually armed, or if they simply fell victim to an armed assailant. Workplace policies prohibiting firearms possession by employees are no deterrent to an armed robber who brings a weapon of his own.
• The authors bias is shown by their citation of a who's-who of anti-gun researchers, including Arthur Kellermann and his thoroughly discredited study on the risk of firearms in the home. Like many other anti-gun studies, the authors recycle information from other anti-gun researchers and use often discredited findings to justify their own biased conclusions. In this case, the authors refer to Kellermann's findings on the "dangers" of firearms in the home to support their biased hypothesis about firearms in the workplace--a conclusion their study only "supports" because they ignore the most important facts surrounding the crimes.

The reality that workplace homicides are overwhelmingly associated with robberies proves false the claims that firearms in the workplace create increased risk. In fact, employer policies that forbid firearms put employees who are at most risk from robbery--such as cab drivers and retail clerks--at greater risk by denying them the ability to defend themselves. The claims of anti-gun activists ignore research by leading criminologists such as Gary Kleck that shows that firearms are used for self-defense as often as 2.5 million times a year--many times more often than then they are used by criminals.⁴

Dr. Kleck also noted in an April 3, 1990, address to the National Academy of Sciences' Panel on the Understanding and Prevention of Violence: "At the aggregate level, in both the best available time series and cross-sectional studies, the overall net effect of gun availability on total rates of violence is not significantly different from zero. The positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse. "

2. Employer Policies Toward Guns and the Risk of Homicide in the Workplace, American Journal of Public Health, May 2005 pp. 830-832.

3.Effectiveness of Safety Measures Recommended for Prevention of Workplace Homicide, Journal of the American Medical Association, February, 2002, pp 1011-1017.

4. Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, N.Y. Aldine de Gruyter, 1997 p. 160.