Might there be a bill of the extreme right-wing persuasion so destructive that this wholly Oklahoma-ized Arkansas Legislature would decline to make it law?
The answer is ... maybe.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee--popularly known as Sane Jeremy Hutchinson and the Crazy Caucus--essentially voted that it didn't want college faculty or staff members to undergo any special gun training beyond the existing concealed-carry process before they could open fire on campus.
But, on Thursday, Hutchinson managed to get that very amendment added to the bill on the Senate floor. The vote was strong, 22-10. If the amendment survives, it would make a bad bill ... let's not say better, but less bad.
State Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville famously sponsors the bill. It would require colleges and universities to permit faculty and staff members who hold concealed-carry permits to carry those weapons on campus.
He says the prospect of a heat-carrying sociology professor might keep a madman from plotting slaughter on a college campus. The bill has passed the House and the Senate committee.
Hutchinson, the beleaguered Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, offered his amendment initially during committee consideration Wednesday. It was to require faculty and staff members who held concealed-carry permits and wanted to pack heat on campus to submit first to an additional 16-hour State Police-designed training program in active-shooter situations. It was soundly rejected.
Here's what Collins said to that idea, by my paraphrase: OK, I'll go along with requiring additional training, but only if, in exchange, you'll expand the authorized on-campus gun-carrying population to include students as well as faculty and staff.
I call that the crossfire-in-the-student-union position.
To let Collins put it his own way: He told me Thursday that he already was restricting the existing concealed-carry law by allowing colleges to deny the application to otherwise qualifying students. If he went along with supplemental training for the faculty and staff, he would be adding two layers of restriction on what otherwise is a legal right. So, yes, he was willing to make a trade--more training in exchange for arming students along with faculty and staff.
Hutchinson and college officials weren't willing, thank goodness.
Collins also said he was worried that the identities of those going through the additional training would become known, causing gun-carrying faculty and staff members to "get the stink-eye" from disapproving colleagues.
Collins' complaint is precisely what makes Hutchinson's amendment mildly redeeming. It might convert the carry-on-campus eligibility process into something just onerous enough to keep some otherwise carry-inclined faculty and staff members from choosing to endure it.
Here is Collins' theory: If the word goes out that folks on college campuses are apt to be randomly armed, then the scheming madman will go somewhere else to kill a hostage population and at least the Legislature will have done what it could to spare your sons and daughters as they seek a higher education.
"I'm trying to stop the shootout at the OK Corral," he told me.
"More guns, less shooting?" I asked.
We left that hanging. We weren't going to get anywhere arguing.
What's ultimately needed is to defeat the bill altogether, though Hutchinson's procedural hurdle might be the best we could hope for.
That's despite the eloquent plea of Chuck Welch, president of the Arkansas State University system. ASU has endured and emerged unscathed from two lockdowns owing to a reported shooter on campus. Welch said the lessons from those experiences is that shots not fired on campus are more important than those fired.
Eloquence from a professional person in an informed position of actual experience counted for nothing. That's how we're doing our lawmaking in Arkansas these days.
Meantime, speaking of bad bills, the measure to regulate public bathroom use by gender will never be in a better form than that by which it was filed last week.
It was a "shell bill," containing only a ballot title announcing its general purpose, but saving the actual text for an amendment later.
This is the looming measure about discriminating against transgender persons in not letting them go into the public restroom labeled for the gender with which they identify.
The bill would risk significant economic harm by deterring fair-minded national and international visitors who deplore discrimination from bringing their business to a state with a blatantly discriminatory law on the books.
This might be--might be--the bill bad enough to be left unpassed.
All the governor and his people need to do is convince a sufficient number in their right-wing base that the emergence of the transgender issue was totally the fault of liberal "guidance" from the Kenyan Muslim Barack Obama, who is gone now, thank the Lord, replaced by such a truly godly man.
If anything would work here in Oklahoma East, that ought to.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/19/2017