The Ohio Court of Appeals recently ruled that the child who was raped has no right to sue the school district. Several courts in Ohio have previously ruled that the operation of school vehicles does not involve protecting the children from harm, including sexual assaults. --source.This case is similar except that it involves an employer firing an employee over a dispute about carrying a personal arm.
Unlike other libertarians, I remain unconvinced that property owners have an inherent right to disarm people who come onto their property without intention of harming them. Self-defense is an individual responsibility, and if you render someone less capable of it, or worse, incapable of it, your actions have taken the onus off of them to defend themselves. I would go so far as to say that any property owner who takes steps to disarm and/or prohibit self-defense should be both civilly and criminally responsible to some extent for any harm that comes to anyone on their property. This goes doubly for the government which not only has the means to protect the public on its property via the police, but which frequently compels people to spend time in places like schools where they have little to no legal right to be armed or defend themselves against bodily harm.
I suppose another advantage to having a government dominated by engineers rather than lawyers is that someone would have probably brought this sort of glaring flaw in the law up in committee, and a patch to the law would have been passed a long time ago. After all, to an engineer, this is a bug. To a trial lawyer, it's a business opportunity.
I don't see any reason why the property owner should be held liable. As long as the invitee is not legally complled to be on the property, they can always vote with their feet and go someplace where they can defend themselves effectively. If they choose to go to a gun-free zone, they assumed the risk.
But then again, I'm a former trial lawyer.
For one thing, there is plenty of evidence from recent events that "gun-free zones" increase the risk of harm to those who go there by virtue of there being a reasonable guarantee to would-be criminals that people do not have the legal means to use effective self-defense. From a public safety and law enforcement point of view, I can't think of a single location more likely to be attractive to a violent offender than a "gun-free zone." I can see permitting home owners an exception, but not businesses, especially in light of how most businesses don't take even rudimentary steps toward providing for the security of their disarmed customers.
For my part, at least, from a religious POV, it's unconsciable to put someone else at risk like that. By disarming them, you become morally responsible for their defense against those that would hurt them. This is one of the practical applications of being "your brother's keeper."
One thing that I never see mentioned is the type of business. Sole proprietorships and partnerships should, ideally, have the rights of the owner. But a corporation has no rights as it is a fictitious individual under the law. It therefor cannot have any sort of right that is greater than that of the natural persons that visit the business. So from a thought out libertarian viewpoint, very few businesses have the right to restrict their customers in the first place.
I do, however agree with you Mike. Those who disarm the populace should bear the burden for their protection. And should be able to be held both civilly and criminally liable for failures. However, I think it is telling to note that it is about impossible to do so. No state agency can be effectively sued simply because the state wont allow it and has come up with rules, laws and case precedent to stifle any such effort. Note in particular the courts protecting the police departments from suits when they have failed to respond to 911 calls in order to do things like paperwork, ruling that the police have no duty to protect any individual even when a special relationship exists. This is intolerable to a free society (not that we have one)