The upcoming vote on the so-called campus carry bill will be at least as much about political safety as student safety.
I'm not going to give my opinion on whether this bill itself is a good idea. But I believe the campus carry bill's sponsor, Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, is sincere about student safety. No one would go through the kind of grief he's gone through as often as he's done it otherwise. He's tried to pass this law for his entire political career to date. He's made a bevy of enemies in his home town for doing so. Both the mayor of his town and the chancellor of the University of Arkansas oppose his bill.
House Bill 1249 would allow state college and university faculty and staff who hold state-issued concealed carry firearm permits to take their weapons to campus. They would help deter mass shooters, Collins said. No college board of trustees in the state seems to agree. All 33 boards were offered the option under previous, compromise legislation pushed by Collins and adopted by the General Assembly. None took it.
Then the Republican got a super-majority in the Legislature after last year's elections.
No Republican legislator can vote against this bill without running severe risks to his or her political future. As of yet, opponents haven't been able to show there would be as much danger in a GOP primary for voting against it.
So this bill isn't going before a legislative body that's going to weigh the matter solely on its merits. Nothing that goes before the Arkansas Legislature is ever weighed solely on the merits, true, but this is a particularly glaring example.
Therefore, a body very heavily invested in the outcome appears poised to overrule the unanimous but separate conclusion reached by the state's 33 college and university boards of trustees. If somebody wants to argue that every one of those 33 boards felt anything like the pressure our Legislature must feel now on this issue, only going in the other way, I'd love to hear it. I'm also unaware of any attempt to divert this issue into one of those semi-detached task forces that study something and come up with a recommendation.
It's notable that Gov. Asa Hutchinson -- the former undersecretary for the federal Department of Homeland Security who the National Rifle Association tapped to come up with answers after the disaster of the Sandy Hook shootings of 2012 -- is on the record on this issue as saying, in effect, that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
In what would be a real stroke of irony if this weren't Fayetteville, which is incongruity's natural habitat, one of the biggest if not the biggest House opponent of this bill is Rep. Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville. I have to give the opposition some credit. They appear far better organized than they were for Collins' previous attempts. Practice makes perfect.
Still, this one isn't going to be settled in a special election in my hometown. There are a lot of people across this state who consider any infringement on their ability to go anywhere with a gun to be intolerable. Some of them are in complete favor of local control on just about anything else. Somewhere, someone who has no child on an Arkansas college campus and who won't set foot on a college campus between now and the next election will surely vote against any lawmaker from his or her district who opposes this bill.
To my knowledge, no similarly powerful group in Arkansas advocates banning guns from anywhere with such single-minded insistence. In a political tug-of-war on gun issues, there's next to nobody holding the other end of this rope until this bill comes up.
Regnat Populus, as the state motto goes. Let the people rule. I have no problem with that. I will point out that in this case, there are a lot of people who oppose guns on campus, but they lack the opposing group's fervor, to put it diplomatically.
By the last count I saw, there are about 130,000 concealed carry permit holders in Arkansas. I'm going to take a wild guess that they don't all work at colleges. By comparison, 1.1 million Arkansans voted in the last presidential election. One might assume, therefore, that the part of the populus that's the most regnat is the one most determined to get what they want.
Commentary on 01/28/2017