LAT: Texas forces companies to be neutral on guns or lose business

[DBoon]

To keep doing business with Texas, companies will in effect have to take a vow of neutrality if the latest school-shooting massacre sets off another nationwide furor over gun control.

That’s because in June 2021, flanked by Republican lawmakers and officials from the National Rifle Assn., Gov. Greg Abbott signed a state law that gives firearm makers, retailers and industry groups a special protection, one that relies on language usually reserved to shield people from racism, sexism, ageism or other forms of prejudice.

As a result, companies signing contracts with government agencies there — including school districts, cities and Texas itself — must verify they don’t “discriminate” against the industry, seeking to force them to ignore any calls to cut their business ties.

The unusual provision, which has since inspired legislation in other Republican-led states, shows how much power the gun lobby has wielded in the nation’s statehouses to fend off any efforts to curtail access to firearms in the wake of mass shootings. The latest occurred Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut a decade ago.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-25/texas-forces-companies-to-be-neutral-on-guns-or-lose-business

[Novara]

1. How is that enforceable?

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

3. Not sure but I remember this...

"in December 1997 Oprah Winfrey, the American talk show host, and Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher and then director of the Humane Society's Eating with a Conscience Campaign, were sued in federal district court in Texas on a charge of disparaging beef."

Texas is a whacky place.

[Novara]

4. I remember that too

Texas is insane. We can't allow one insane state setting legal precedent for the rest of the country. They've already done it with the abortion vigilante law.

[Solly Mack]

2. Can't have people hurting the gun's feelings or making the gun feel uncomfortable.

[Girard442]

5. Lie.

And when caught in the lie, lie about that.

That's what they do.

[unblock]

6. so, if i own a strip mall in texas that has a daycare center, a children's gymnastic place,

and a video game arcade, and there's one vacancy, and a merchant applies who wants to sell massively overpowered child-killing machines, i can't refuse to rent to them?

even if it costs me all my other business as those tenants quickly need to move out as their business is ruined when parents refuse to let their kids near my mall?

[DBoon]

7. yes, you can refuse to rent to them

but you will be disqualified from contracting with the State of Texas

[Claire Oh Nette]

8. State tells business what they can say. Huh...

Isn't that a violation of the corporation's first amendment rights?


Or are rights so totally 20th century??