A Study That Won't Make You Feel Good in Half the Country

Sara Murray of the WSJ has an interesting story this week about state legislation in the now 23 states that as of January will require employers to allow employees to bring weapons into their parking lots. Guns in the Parking Lot: A Delicate Workplace Issue. 

What caught my attention was the mention of this statistic:

 A 2005 North Carolina-based study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that workplaces that allowed guns were about five times more likely to have a worker get killed on the job compared to workplaces that prohibited all kinds of weapons.

For guns, the linkage was actually 5 to 7 times more likely. For those who want to get into the weeds, a link to an abstract of the study is here.

Now one study alone is not enough to dictate policy, but if I am an employer responsible for assembling a large group of humans 300+ times a year, it would certainly give me sufficient pause to ask for a concrete explanation of why such a legislative action makes sense.