Get ready to taste some political red meat.
Missouri’s Republican-dominated state legislature is about to do something it has rarely done in the state’s post-rational era. It is preparing to actually legislate some of the frighteningly simplistic—just inane—rhetoric that heretofore has been reserved for inflaming the GOP’s wing-nut fringe. We’re not talking concealed-carry shades of gray here. This is about arming teachers and letting a man saunter down any street in the state with his loaded assault rifle if he damn well pleases. “Guns and God” isn’t just a rallying cry anymore. It’ll be our way of life. It’ll be the law.
Now, guns will be just one of many topics when the Missouri General Assembly convenes September 10 to attempt to override some of the 33 vetoes issued by Gov. Jay Nixon this session. And with veto-proof majorities (two-thirds) in both the Senate and the House, the Republicans presumably possess the power to act in ways that the party’s vanishing Grown-Up Caucus can no longer rein in.
There are all sorts of bad causes that the Republicans (with a handful of Democratic enablers, to be fair) will attempt to enact through overrides, the way they wreaked havoc on the state’s tax code earlier this year at the behest of their rightful owner, St. Louis’ Rex Sinquefield. There are 10 bills containing tax breaks and incentives that Nixon calls the “Friday Favors,” which he says would drain state and lo-cal revenue by $776 million. There’s the customary throwing-of-the-bone to anti-abortion forces, this year a bill to inflict an additional 48 hours of misery (a.k.a. longer waiting periods) on rape victims and other women who already must wait 24 hours to receive legal abortions in the state. And of course, there’s the controversial school-transfer bill that the governor properly vetoed because of provisions that would have allowed public funds to pay tuition at private, nonsectarian schools (among his reasons). The list goes on.
But this gun bill is in a class by itself, politically speaking. It really represents a watershed, even more than the legislature’s repulsive actions of 2003, when it enacted concealed-carry laws just four years after the people had rejected the same idea in a bitterly contested statewide ballot referendum. As outrageous as that was, this bill is worse, because it runs gun policy off the rails. And it appears there is a real chance of an override, as the House passed the measure with a veto-proof majority, and the Senate might have done so had three Republican members not been absent.
Here is some of what’s on tap if this nonsense makes it into law.
Teachers and administrators can be armed, voluntarily, at any public school. Districts will be permitted to designate “one or more” elementary- or secondary-school teachers or administrators as “school protection officers.” After an unspecified amount of training, these individuals will be permitted to carry concealed firearms or self-defense spray devices in any school in the district. And should they let their weapons get out of their control at school, these officers would face a class B misdemeanor and maybe the loss of their jobs, which I’m sure would be of much solace to the parents of any children wounded or killed because of such a mistake.
Information about the identity of these school protection officers “shall not be considered public information and shall not be subject to a request for public records.” Translation: Parents are not entitled to know whether there is an armed teacher or administrator in their child’s school or classroom. (There is an interesting exception to this: The state public safety director must keep a list of all school protection officers and make it available to all law-enforcement agencies. So if you’re a police officer—or know one well—perhaps it’s possible to know who is packing at your kid’s school.)
Open carry of firearms cannot be prohibited by any jurisdiction for anyone who has in his or her possession a valid concealed-carry permit from Missouri or “from another state that is recognized by this state.” That’s right, the government can’t stop someone from walking down the street or into a business with an assault rifle in each hand and a couple of pistols strapped in holsters.
Then there’s this stirring passage: “In the absence of any reasonable and articulable suspicion of criminal activity, no person carrying a concealed or unconcealed firearm shall be disarmed or physically restrained by a law enforcement officer unless under arrest.” That should pretty well guarantee that any concealed-carry permit holder will have ample time to exercise his or her “Second Amendment rights”—e.g., do whatever shooting he or she sees fit—well before that person could be disarmed. Actually, it doesn’t matter whether the cops can tell the good guys from the bad guys, seeing as how they can apprehend neither before a crime happens.
That’s not all that’s in this bill, but I think it’s enough for now. Nixon focused exclusively on the school side of the gun bill when issuing his brief statement, presumably because he heard from enough alarmed educators of all stripes who object to the illogic—and more important, the danger—posed by miscasting them as law-enforcement officers. But the open-carry madness, and especially the notion that no city or other jurisdiction in the state even has the right to prevent it, is arguably even more disgusting.
Please don’t accuse anyone in the General Assembly of having an original thought on any of this. If you recall, in the aftermath of the horrendous Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy that claimed the lives of 27 innocent souls at the hands of legally owned firearms, National Rifle Association executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre hid from the media for a few days before slithering forth with a brilliant distraction: Let’s not talk about the proliferation of deadly arsenals of weapons in our country (because that’s not so good for business). Let’s just arm the teachers and principals so they can shoot back.
It’s an idea too moronic for serious discourse, but since it was specifically intended to derail serious discourse, you must give this scoundrel his due: It worked. Legislators around the country began cutting and pasting LaPierre’s verbiage into their bills, which is convenient for those who weren’t big on reading and writing. But it’s still just amazing that human beings are actually considering this.
In the movies, an armed teacher might heroically save the school, perhaps while the shooter pauses to give a speech about why he was about to spread carnage. But in real life, the odds of something like that happening are infinitesimal and definitely lower than the odds of an accidental discharge or theft of that teacher’s weapon.
And speaking of the movies, how about that open-carry proposal? Why not return all of our towns to the glory day of the old Westerns, when men were men, and the good guys shot the bad guys? And if those wimpy sociologists must bore us with their fancy notions, then let them study how much faster a guy gets his grande iced latte when he orders it with a gun in his hand.
Meanwhile, no serious debate about reducing America’s singular proliferation of weaponry is even under consideration. Gun control is verboten. In fact, the entire subject of making schools safer must be conducted at a second-grade level of comprehension. At least we have irony going for us.
As to open carry, this notion is almost too bizarre to ponder. I don’t even know what to say to someone who thinks it’s OK to carry assault rifles down a city street or into a public park or shopping mall. Are you kidding? And if you’re a “conservative” legislator, the sort of person who deeply resents getting bossed around by the federal government, are you really passing legislation out of Jefferson City that tells St. Louis and other cities they don’t have the right to tell those with concealed-carry permits that they can’t saunter around with weapons openly brandished? Really?
One interesting local note is that among the Republican legislators who supported this bill is Rep. Rick Stream of Kirkwood. He’ll be voting this month, presumably, on whether to override Nixon and thus tell the 90 municipalities of St. Louis County that they no longer have the right to ban the open carry of weaponry. Stream, as you probably know, will then come home to run for county executive.
A whopping 69.5 percent of St. Louis County voters opposed concealed carry in 1999, and on August 5, no less than 59 percent of them voted against an innocuous Right to Bear Arms constitutional amendment that passed statewide with 61 percent of the vote. Perhaps Councilman Steve Stenger, his Democratic opponent, should suggest Stream is running in the wrong part of the state.
Or better yet, maybe the two could actually conduct an intelligent debate about gun policy and about whether more or fewer guns is the best long-term strategy. Trouble is, I’m guessing Stream’s supporters would only attend if they could bring their arsenals, which might be a little uncomfortable. So maybe let’s forget the idea, because Missouri is, after all, a red state—as in red meat.
And blood.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
