In New Jersey, libraries are off limits to concealed carry. That didn't matter to a 19-year-old who's now facing charges for shooting a man in the face at the Freehold library back in April. Now the borough's library director has been canned by the Freehold Public Library Board of Trustees, who say she created an unsafe environment.
Democrat lawmakers in Trenton are the ones who did that when they included libraries in the plethora of places off-limits to lawful carry that was adopted in the wake of the Bruen decision in 2022. Still, the board decided that Kathy Mulholland, who's been in charge of the library system for nearly 20 years, failed to address safety concerns by employees both before and after the April shooting.
The termination vote followed a municipal investigation into working conditions that included interviews with almost all of her staff. Employees were nearly unanimous in their assertion that the library was an unsafe work environment well before the shooting. The report revealed that a baseball bat was stored inside the building for potential altercations with the public, and one employee even kept a crowbar in their desk for the same purpose.
Board members cited reports of individuals wandering into the building under the influence of drugs or alcohol, as well as instances of patrons accessing pornography on public computer terminals.
Employees who raised concerns about security and safety to the director either had their complaints suppressed or ignored, said Mayor Kevin A. Kane, whose office grants him a seat on the board and who voted in favor of Mulholland’s termination.
He recounted an incident where two men were found smoking marijuana at the library; when told to stop, the men replied that they did it all the time.
Mulholland can't be responsible for people walking into the library under the influence, nor what they search for online. The real question is what did she do in response to these incidents, and why.
Take the baseball bat and crowbar that were hidden by library employees to use as potential self-defense weapons in the case of an irate patron. Did Mulholland instruct employees to kick out library users who were under the influence or accessing pornography online? Was there a policy established by either Mulholland or the Board of Trustees on how to handle situations like that? If library staff were tasked with removing those patrons, I can understand why they'd want to be able to protect themselves in case a patron got violent.
And what did the mayor do when he encountered a couple of guys smoking pot at the library? Did he call police? Did he try to escort them out of the building himself?
It's possible that Mulholland just turned a blind eye to these activities because she just didn't care. It's also possible, though, that Mulholland herself felt like her hands were tied thanks to the progressive ideology that dominates local government. Freehold Township has fully embraced DEI initiatives, and has feel-good committees like the Freehold Borough Human Relations Advisory Committee and the Freehold Township's Human Relations Council. If Mulholland started cracking down on patrons who were behaving badly, it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe she could have been accused of discrimination or violating the rights of those patrons.
Trustee Zahra Clarke, who was the lone dissenting vote against Mulholland’s firing, argued that the director was being used as a scapegoat and that the Board of Trustees had ultimately failed in its oversight.
If the board was going to get rid of the director, perhaps the entire board should be replaced too, Clarke argued.
I think that would have been fair, but Clarke was apparently the only board member who felt that way.
Interestingly, one Freehold resident who was at the trustees' meeting posted on Instagram that "trustees discussed approximately 258 pages of investigative records—but the public has not had the opportunity to examine the underlying materials."
A motion to allow limited public comment failed. During the discussion that followed, trustees who reviewed the investigative materials expressed sharply different views about what those records showed. Some questioned aspects of the investigation and pointed to logs they said showed action being taken. Others said employee accounts described serious safety and leadership concerns.
That individual has now filed an open records request to get access to the investigative records, but as Bearing Arms contributor John Petrolino can attest, the state's Open Public Records Act is riddled with exemptions for state and local governments, so who knows if those investigative materials will ever see the light of day.
I know that the board feels pressure to "do something" after the shooting at the library, but they should be directing their ire at the state legislature and not at the library director. Of course, I can't imagine that a majority of the board would be in favor scrapping the state's "no guns allowed" policy for libraries, even if it would make the building a much safer place.
