A legislative committee would not let a bunch of Arkansas parents speak during a three-hour meeting on child safety in our public schools.
Instead, the committee let a couple of out-of-state experts do all the talking.
If the topic had been fire safety, I doubt the committee would have dared to ignore those parents. If it had been about structural safety of school buildings, or tornado drills, or drugs on schoolyards or kidnapping by snatching kids off of playgrounds or anything else but one special topic, this high-handedness would have been unthinkable.
But this was a meeting about school shootings.
Anything that touches guns can only do so wearing kid gloves, it seems. So advocates of an armed deterrence approach to school safety not only got three hours to interact with the committee, they did not even have the inconvenience of having to defend their arguments against people who live here and send their kids and grandkids to our schools.
If the committee had met 30 more minutes, there would be no serious perceived snub. All the committee had to do was give a couple of members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America a chance to say something. Then this would have been another routine meeting. The moms might have made a few good quotes. That would have been it.
Gun rights advocates should have been treated like what they are, a group with broad and strong popular support in this state and a constitutional guarantee. Instead, gun rights advocates were flagrantly treated like a powerful, privileged special interest. This does them no favors.
It does no good to argue, as some did, that the committee was "fact-finding" that day and will listen to "political groups" later. Facts are not found by giving long, cleared tracks for delivering unchallenged monologues. If those experts had good points, those points could have stood up to a 15-minute rebuttal by a group that, politically speaking, are trying to slay Goliath with a slingshot.
Nothing is more political than controlling the flow of which facts to consider. Anybody can win a race when there are no other runners in it. The only reason to let only one team's players take the field is to pick the winner.
This was the second meeting of the same Joint Performance Review Committee on the issue of school safety. No gun control advocate has had a chance to speak yet.
After 37 and a half years in the news business, I have learned a few lessons. One is this: You can find an "expert" to tell you anything you want to hear.
So now the impression that the fix is in on the committee's final recommendations is probably both accurate and impossible to change. Just mitigating the appearance of a rigged game would require holding another meeting. Another meeting was already in the works, we are told. That would have been nice to have told the people at the meeting who waited three hours for any chance to speak.
I hope this committee assembles and listens to a three-hour lecture expounding the supposed virtues of gun control. The punishment would fit the crime, although some of them might argue it would be cruel and unusual.
I support the 2nd Amendment. I support all of the Bill of Rights and every other unrepealed amendment of the U.S. Constitution. To the best of my knowledge, putting locks that can be secured from the inside of a classroom in our schools would not violate anyone's rights. That is the kind of topic I would like to hear discussed more -- as it was in another, non-legislative meeting also held in Little Rock on the very same day.
Insuring there is such a lock on every classroom door in Arkansas that does not have one would be expensive. Neither freedom nor safety comes cheap, although this particular price seems like a small one to pay.
I commend Sen. Alan Clark, R-Lonsdale. According to the news account I read, he approached the Moms Demand Action group after the meeting and said that while he likely disagreed with them, "We should have allowed you to speak."
He was right.
Commentary on 07/14/2018