I've known a few folks who drove for Uber and Lyft through the years as a way to make some extra money. A couple have benefitted from having that during times when they were out of a job and needed to make ends meet until they got a new one. It worked out well for them.
Unfortunately, there's an issue. It seems one of the policies Lyft has for drivers in the name of safety puts them at risk.
See, you're not allowed to carry a firearm while you're on the clock with Lyft, so to speak. If you're driving for them, you're considered an employee and they say no guns. Ostensibly, this is because allowing drivers to have firearms would present a situation where a driver might do something stupid.
This is nonsense, of course, because gun owners tend to be among the most law-abiding folks out there. Those with carry permits are even more so.
As a result of Lyft's policies, though, stuff like this can happen:
A man was arrested after he allegedly kidnapped a Lyft driver at gunpoint and forced her to drive him to a Denny's where he beat her with a gun.
According to an arrest affidavit, the incident began after an unnamed Lyft driver drove Anthony Milton to his requested location. Once they arrived, Milton allegedly refused to leave the car and pulled out a gun. He demanded to be taken to a different location, which was a Denny's in Hazelwood, Missouri, according to the document.
He used the weapon to force the driver into the Denny's restaurant so she would not be out of his sight, according to the affidavit. The victim managed to duck into the bathroom and hit a panic button on her phone, but Milton was close behind her, per the document. Milton then allegedly hit the victim in the head with the gun while the pair were alone in the bathroom. He allegedly left immediately after.
Now, the first thing some might say is that there's no reason to believe this particular driver would have been armed, and that's certainly true. There isn't.
But the truth is that most criminals know that rideshare drivers are disarmed as a matter of company policy, so they make for easy targets in the first place. The fact that the company disarms its drivers makes them all a target. If drivers could carry firearms, though, they'd make poorer targets because let's be real, a lot of them would get guns and carry them since they often have to make pick-ups or drop-offs in sketchy neighborhoods.
Further, Milton was charged with, among other things, unlawful possession of a firearm. In other words, he had a gun despite the laws saying he couldn't, which illustrates the problem with gun control as a whole.
We have a rule-following driver doing what she was told to do, only to have her run into a criminal who cares nothing for the rules.
That's what happens in every anti-gun state in the country. It happens all the time and is almost never presented like this by the media reporting these stories. Instead, it's just a crime story. The fact that the driver never had a choice about carrying a gun or not – at least, not if she wanted to follow the rules – is never mentioned.
And that's another problem.
