Here in Texas, carrying a concealed handgun if you are licensed has been legal for some time. This year, the state legislature also ruled that those same license holders could carry handguns openly. There are rules about holsters, etc., but basically, unless there are specific signs prohibiting it, here in Texas you may be seeing a lot more guns in January.
In our shop, we wondered if we should maybe get to know a bit more about this, maybe try and help our clients to decide for their own buildings whether they should take a position on the subject.
So we sent someone to a BOMA seminar on the subject, checked with our insurance agent, and then debated among ourselves to come up with something of a white paper on the subject. I'm in the process of sending that out to our clients now.
So many questions arise: Should handguns be banned? What is the owner's liability? What is the Property Manager's liability? Can each tenant do something different?
Easy answers are hard to find. The conclusion we finally arrived at was that employees and visitors to an office property should not have to have the expectation that they will encounter someone carrying a weapon openly. Given that concealed carry is also legal, we decided to recommend to our clients the middle way of banning openly carried guns, but not install the signage banning handguns that would be concealed. Let me know if you would like to read the full white paper.
