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Missouri's Answer to School Shootings [1]

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Date: 2023-04-25  

Missouri Republicans have some ideas for protecting the state's kids from mass shootings: Better locks on school doors. Automated external defibrillators. Bleeding control kits. An app that alerts emergency responded to an active shooting. All told, Missouri is on track to spend more than $70 million on these and other school-safety ideas — all while its ruling party refuses to take even the mildest steps toward reining in unfettered access to weapons of war, even for domestic abusers and the mentally ill. This is akin to fighting a raging house fire with a hose in one hand and flamethrower in the other.

It's not that the improvements they're pursuing are bad ideas. Schools should be secure, and defibrillators belong in crowded public spaces generally. But you would think that when political leaders feel the need to suggest schools be equipped with kits specifically designed to stanch massive bleeding because of the increasing likelihood of school mass shootings, the thought process might, at some point, bend toward preventing such shootings in the first place.

There is no better way to do that than to institute common-sense gun regulations. Yet Gov. Mike Parson and his fellow Republicans who run Missouri have instead been going in the opposite direction in the past several years, systematically dismantling almost every firearm law the state used to have.

Today, anyone in Missouri can sell a gun to a stranger, with no license or background check required and no questions asked. That renders one of the state's few remaining gun laws — the prohibition on felons buying firearms — effectively unenforceable. And police in Missouri are hampered from confronting guns in public because there's no longer any state law requiring any kind of permit to carry them.

The Legislature also passed a constitutionally ludicrous state law declaring federal gun laws null and void here, which will eventually be overturned in court but in the meantime has further hobbled law enforcement. And lawmakers' determined refusal to pass a red-flag law empowering courts to disarm those deemed mentally dangerous directly contributed to the two innocent deaths in last year's St. Louis school shooting, because the shooter's family had no legal way to keep weapons away from someone they knew was mentally ill. governor.mo.gov/...

None of these situations arose by accident. They are the result of an intentional project by Missouri's Republican leaders to give their state some of the loosest gun laws in America. It's no coincidence that the state's once-average firearms death rate has concurrently risen to among the nation's highest.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/25/2165803/-Missouri-s-Answer-to-School-Shootings

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