The gun orgy at the state Capitol is based on an overwhelmingly dominant belief that persons who bother to get licenses for guns they carry are not the ones we need to worry about.
It's that they might be the ones to prevent the real violence that threatens us every day.
Well, there's that, and then there's also raging legislative fear of getting anything less than an "A" on a scorecard the National Rifle Association might compile on voting records and mail to constituents.
You let the NRA give a rural Arkansas legislator a B-plus and suddenly you'll see the rumor mill gin up back home about the guns he wants to take away. There must be some reason he didn't get an "A," for goodness' sakes.
Then here will come a Republican primary opponent promising to get an A-plus. Suddenly some old boy might be at risk of having to pay his own way to Little Rock because the NRA didn't like his vote on some amendment.
The effect is that what started as state Rep. Charlie Collins' bill to let college faculty and staff members with concealed-carry permits bring those guns on campus ended up allowing the carrying of licensed concealed weapons practically anywhere in the state. It even requires churches to put up no-gun signs if they want to prohibit firearms in the pews.
"For God so loved the world that we say leave your gun outside."
There actually is a provision in this revised bill specifically saying justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court may pack beneath their robes on the job.
The provision is apt to turn down the volume on some of my criticisms of the high jurists. Or else it'll make me think twice about going over to sit through somebody else's investiture.
But do you see what I did there? I jokingly invoked danger or threat resulting from permission granted to law-abiding people with proper licenses to carry their firearms wherever they want.
And that's precisely the kind of thing gun advocates abhor, and it's a pressure point in what's something of a culture war.
People who despair of all these gun-proliferation bills inevitably argue that the ubiquity of firearms creates a more dangerous society, one vulnerable to crossfires and shootouts. The presence of a gun in church ... why, the very idea offends their religion.
But the people who advocate these gun-proliferation bills say law-abiding persons who've dutifully jumped through all the hoops to license their concealed weapons don't open fire, or start violence, or put any blood in the streets.
They say those people would never shoot a preacher for meddling or a columnist for criticizing, probably. They say those people merely want to fortify themselves against the real danger that scares them, meaning the criminal violence they read and hear about, even extending to churches. They say those people believe logically that the proliferation of like-minded and law-abiding armed persons will accrue to a greater general safety. And there are, in Arkansas, many more of them than the other.
I asked this question of Charlie Collins on Monday: I understood his premise that the likelihood of rampant guns on college campuses would deter crazed mass shooters from going on those campuses for their mayhem. But what if the crazed mass shooter, being crazed, came on campus, anyway?
Would the campus be safer with scores of civilians pulling out their concealed weapons for warfare? Or would it be safer with the police and security personnel tending to the matter under the active-shooter policies in place from the administration?
Collins said it would be better to have scores of civilian shooters pulling out their concealed weapons, now that Gov. Asa Hutchinson has plowed what Collins characterizes as new ground in the gun debate.
Collins argued that Hutchinson had put Arkansas in the gun vanguard by extracting from the NRA a concession to a supplemental eight-hour training program--meaning a one-day class beyond the concealed licensure process--for persons wanting to carry on campus.
It was the imposition of that additional training, Collins said, that allowed the bill to be broadened to let those additionally trained licensees also carry their concealed firearms into bars and churches and the state Capitol and beyond.
That had best be a doozy of an eight-hour course that the State Police will set up, or, more to the point, farm out to a private contractor.
And attendees had best pay close attention. After all, they're going to walk out of that 8-to-5 class essentially authorized as regular SWAT teamers.
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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 03/16/2017