I’M WATCHING MY GRANDMOTHER (my sister has her during the week, but she had to go out of town today) and on the drive out to her place I heard Mike Gallagher talking about this Florida legislation:

Sen. Durell Peaden, R-Crestview, and Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, have filed bills that would permit workers to have the guns on the employer’s property as long as the weapons remain locked in their vehicles. Both proposals included provisions that shield companies from lawsuits in case an employee committed a crime with the gun they had been storing in their car.

The proposals resemble an Oklahoma law that drew attention when a number of major companies, including ConocoPhillips and Halliburton, sued to have it overturned.

Supporters of such laws say they prevent companies from forcing workers to give up their constitutional right to carry firearms.

I think the bill is probably a good idea, and it’s unlikely to do any harm. But the discussion was the sort of thing that makes law professors tear out their hair.

Gallagher kept saying that employers were violating Second Amendment rights by banning firearms. But the Second Amendment — like the rest of the Constitution, except for the 13th Amendment — doesn’t apply to private actors. Banning firearms on private property is no more a Second Amendment violation than banning videocameras on private property is a First Amendment violation.

That doesn’t make the bill wrong, of course. Legislation to stop employers from doing things seen as socially harmful is commonplace. The Constitution doesn’t prohibit racial discrimination by private employers, but state and federal legislation does, because we think it’s a bad thing.

There’s nothing in the proposed Florida law that’s either required or forbidden by the Constitution (and if Florida, or other states, wanted to make employers and businesses that have no-firearms policies strictly liable for injuries caused by criminals on their premises, that wouldn’t violate the Constitution either). But Gallagher’s discussion illustrates how quick people are, even on the right, to constitutionalize all sorts of arguments that aren’t really about the Constitution at all.