Having written last week that it appeared Gov. Asa Hutchinson and some Republican legislators were preparing to stand up to the National Rifle Association on the issue of college-campus carry of concealed weapons, I am obliged to provide an update.
The governor and Republican legislators didn't ... stand up to the NRA, much.
They negotiated. The NRA was the Crimson Tide. Arkansas Republicans were the Razorbacks. I speak in a football context.
The compromise is that the NRA accepted eight hours instead of 16 in special training in a course the Arkansas State Police will design on active-shooter situations for campus-carriers, and four hours of which the state police can waive.
In exchange, these special licensees--for basic concealed-carry permits and certification in four to eight more hours--may include faculty, staff, all students and any visitors to, or stragglers on, college campuses, as well as frequenters of just about any location in the state including the state Capitol, unless posted otherwise by legal authority.
The only stated exceptions are K-12 public schools, courtrooms and prison facilities. We draw the line on unfettered guns only in protection of children and to keep bad guys from escaping from courtrooms or jails.
What all that means is that the NRA beheld the campus-carry dispute in Arkansas, saw an opportunity, moved in, glowered from the Senate gallery and got guns galore in exchange for cutting a proposed special active-shooting training course in half.
More guns, less training--it's the NRA and Arkansas way.
The compromise did one small thing for the minuscule number of gun-eschewers in the gun-crazed state. It said specifically that you couldn't be held liable for harm to somebody you told to leave his gun outside of a property on which you had the legal authority to deny concealed firearms.
Your home, for example. If you told a dinner guest to leave his gun outside, and then an intruder into your home shot him dead, you couldn't be sued--a minor victory, perhaps, considering that you could well be dead yourself.
Hutchinson's position started out as supporting college and university officials who wanted to preserve the status quo giving their boards authority to prohibit guns, as all now do.
He first caved to allow faculty, staff and students over age 25 to carry on campus, but only with special additional 16-hour training. As of Thursday, he caved further to allow any special licensee at all to carry on a college campus, and pretty much everywhere. He retreated, but not quite caved, on the additional training, accepting eight hours and maybe as few as four.
One of the state Senate's zanier right-wingers--Linda Collins-Smith of Pocahontas--thought the compromise still too restrictive on guns. But the settlement passed over her absurd objections Thursday afternoon in the Senate.
Having said famously two days earlier that you can't get too pro-gun in Arkansas, Collins-Smith insisted on having her name taken off as a co-sponsor of Rep. Charlie Collins' bill, which was the vehicle for the amendment detailing the compromise.
What Arkansas legislators fear more than anything is a less than "A" grade from the NRA. This compromise surely saves "A's" for everybody, which tells you right there it's not much compromise.
It was the dangerously tenacious and competent Charlie Collins who led the negotiation, working with the NRA and the governor's nephew and Senate majority leader, Jim Hendren. The governor's office pretty much ceded the matter to them.
The irony is that, by resisting Charlie Collins' bill in its original form, and then opposing the first compromise that added students to faculty and staff members as those authorized to carry on campus, college and university officials effectively left the issue vulnerable to the much broader concealed-carry permission that resulted.
But you can't blame them for opposing altogether a notion they found dangerous and repugnant.
I wonder, though, if former state Rep. Nate Bell of Mena wasn't in the ballpark when he put on social media Thursday afternoon that Collins' bill in its original form would have resulted in maybe 10 professors statewide carrying guns.
A gun advocate himself, Bell might simply have been calling academic people wusses. He's the fellow, you remember, who tweeted a chortle about anti-gun Bostonians cowering in their homes from the at-large Boston Massacre bombers.
Then-House Speaker Davy Carter, a Republican, felt a need to apologize for the state to Boston over that one.
As for the now-looming new Arkansas law, state Sen. Will Bond of Little Rock--yes, one of those, meaning a progressive--was aghast that the new compromise failed to exempt UAMS. He said "we've lost all our common sense on guns."
We lost common sense on guns more than a decade ago. What we've lost now is our full collective mind.
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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 03/12/2017