A young Virginia woman's story is going viral over the weekend after she claims she was fired from her job as a social worker for simply possessing a permit to carry concealed weapons.
The woman claims that at the time of her termination, she wasn't carrying a weapon.
Storm Durham, who was until Friday a social worker for the city of Roanoke, posted on social media that she was fired from her job for being a legal concealed carry permittee and was escorted out of her workplace by three police officers upon learning of her termination because, as she claimed, she was deemed a "safety risk." At the time, Durham said she was not in possession of a firearm.
The 22-year-old woman later went to her Facebook page to explain the full story.
In a lengthy post, Durham explained she was fired simply for having the concealed carry permit. She said she never had a firearm or concealed weapon while at work.
"I was fired today due to having a concealed carry permit. Was my gun on me? No. Has it ever been on me during my job, or visits, or anything related to work? No. When I told them that it has never been on me during work, what did they say? 'How do we know that.' Search me. Do I have a criminal record? No," she wrote.
I have a concealed carry permit. I own guns. I hunt. I target shoot. I represent Women hunters and outdoorswomen. Does that make me a criminal? Does that make me a safety risk to others? A big enough safety risk to be escorted by three Roanoke City Police officers? So scary and threatening that I need to be treated like a criminal? To be humiliated and looked down upon for owning a gun? For legally having a gun, registering that gun, and having the appropriate documentation for that gun?
"That was NEVER on their property or in their building. A gun that was never used for evil, but as protection as I am a survivor or sexual assault. Protection for being that white, 22 year old, female. I am an American," she added.
According to one interview with Durham, she believes it was not. The Commonwealth of Virginia is a right-to-work and at-will work state, meaning an employer can dismiss employees without reason or notice while employees can quit without reason or notice.
However, since Durham believes her termination was in violation of her Second Amendment rights, she will likely lawyer up and fight her termination, which is what hundreds of people have urged her to do.
Maryland Department of Corrections asks a candidate for his Facebook password.
Do you think Facebook and Twitter account privacy settings guarantee future employers or schools can't see your private posts? You need to think again.
Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes.
The following photos were taken at the Conservative Leadership Conference that was hosted by the Civitas Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina, on March 2nd and 3rd, 2012. The mission of the Civitas Institute is to facilitate the implementation of conservative policy solutions to improve the lives of all North Carolinians. The guest speakers for this sold out conference were Charles Krauthammer, the celebrated American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and political commentator, Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a non-partisan public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., and Jason Lewis, host of the nationally syndicated Jason Lewis Show and author of "Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights". As you can see from the photos, we all had a wonderful time at this two-day conference that was filled with powerful talks by the guest speakers and extremely informative workshops that will help us to sharpen our conservative skills for the crucial upcoming November election.
Donna Yowell and Louis Stannard, co-founders of Feet to the Fire, an activist grassroots organization. Their latest project, NC Tea Billboard Project - billboards stating a conservative message of RECLAIM AMERICA, VOTE ENOUGH! The billboards will be strategically placed around Charlotte and then throughout the state in time to welcome the Democrats to our state for their convention!
If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet's flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.
Since the Net's inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a "multi-stakeholder" governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net's phenomenal success.
Unnerving narrative about the misuse of personal online information—without our knowledge—to track, judge and harm us in innumerable aspects of our lives.
Social-network executives often dismiss online privacy concerns: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it," said Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy. But the constitutional freedoms of millions of people posting personal data on Facebook and other networks are violated routinely, and the law has not kept up with the new technology, writes lawyer Andrews (Institute for Science, Law and Technology/Illinois Institute of Technology; Immunity, 2008, etc.). Noting that social networks make their profits on users' data, she describes the multibillion-dollar industry of data aggregators who mine online data for the advertising industry, often "weblining" people, denying them certain opportunities due to observations about their digital selves. Most users have no idea how much information is being collected about them: "People have a misplaced trust that what they post is private." The results can be devastating: A Georgia teacher posted a photo showing her drinking a glass of Guinness at an Irish brewery, and she was forced to resign after the photo was e-mailed anonymously to her school superintendent. After seeing a mother's MySpace page showing her posing provocatively in lingerie, a judge awarded custody of her young children to her husband. "Virtually every interaction a person has in the offline world can be tainted by social network information," writes the author, who proposes creating a "Social Network Constitution" to govern our lives online. Her governing principles would protect against police searches of social networks without probable cause, require social networks to post conspicuous Miranda-like privacy warnings and set rules for the use or collecting of user information.
Authoritative, important reading for policymakers and an unnerving reminder that anything you post can and will be used against you.
VIDEO – CHRIS MATTHEWS ON OBAMA – IS THE THRILL GONE?
The most striking difference between the two countries is Internet access.
Developments in Egypt over the last two weeks brought Cuba to my mind. Why does a similar rebellion against five decades of repression there still appear to be a far-off dream? Part of the answer is in the relationship between the Castro brothers—Fidel and Raúl—and the generals. The rest is explained by the regime's significantly more repressive model. In the art of dictatorship, Hosni Mubarak is a piker.
That so many Egyptians have raised their voices in Tahrir Square is a testament to the universal human yearning for liberty. But it is a mistake to ignore the pivotal role of the military. I'd wager that when the history of the uprising is written, we will learn that Egypt's top brass did not approve of the old man's succession plan to anoint his son in the next election.
Castro has bought loyalty from the secret police and military by giving them control of the three most profitable sectors of the economy—retail, travel and services. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow to them every year. If the system collapses, so does that income. Of course the Egyptian military also owns businesses. But it doesn't depend on a purely state-owned economy. And as a recipient of significant U.S. aid and training for many years, the Egyptian military has cultivated a culture of professionalism and commitment to the nation over any single individual.
'Stability" has been the goal of civilized foreign policy since the dawn of the Cold War and arguably since the Congress of Vienna, which posited a framework for international relations in 1815. Stability, whose virtues are many, has had a worthy run. It's done.
Stability is done as we have known it, at least until political leadership evolves a better understanding than they have shown during the events in Egypt of the permanently unstable world they've tumbled into. The man who pitched the curators of national stability into their current shocked state—evident this week in the streets of Cairo and before that in the capital of Tunisia and before that in the U.S.'s November elections—is William Shockley.
Shockley, a physicist, co- invented the transistor. The transistor replaced the vacuum tube as the central component of all electronic devices. The transistor enabled Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, an ocean of apps and the unending storm of information that blows all of us, including politicians, here and there like leaves. Why would anyone think it possible in such a world for a Hosni Mubarak to maintain stability with the methods he's used since 1981?
The point here is not to argue again that information and communication technology (ICT) has caused another colorful "revolution." Nor is it to overstate the power of these technologies to enable democratic reform.
My point is merely to describe what is going on in front of our faces: This new, exponentially expanding world of information technologies is now creating permanent instability inside formerly stable political arrangements.
and to the people of North Carolina.