Allen County’s commissioners, along with the board members of Allen County Community College, face a new gun challenge. Last week the Kansas House passed a misbegotten bill that would take away their right to ban concealed weapons in their buildings because they don’t have adequate security measures.
Read metal detectors and security guards.
Neither the county nor the college could afford either one in the best of times, let alone today, when budgets are bare-boned.
The measure passed by a 65-57 vote in the House and now goes to the Senate, where concealed-carry proponents have a smaller majority. A likely veto could not be overridden.
A metal detector costs about $5,000 and must be manned to be effective. It would be necessary to have one at every entrance at ACCC and Allen County Courthouse to meet the adequate-security standard. A substantial annual wage bill would zap those two budgets.
The cost alone is sufficient reason to kill the bill in the Senate. To allow it to become law also would take away the right of Kansas county governments and community college boards to manage their own af-fairs. Few of them would decide to spend scarce bud-get dollars to install detectors; fewer still would de-cide to give their buildings the threatened-fortress at-mosphere that a metal scanner and armed guards creates. Faced with these hurtful alternatives, they might go against their better judgments, take down their no-gun signs and surrender to the National Rifle Association.
THIS BRINGS US to the curious logic behind the bill, which is that more guns equals greater safety.
Those who support opening all public buildings that don’t have metal scanners and guards at their en-trances to people licensed to carry concealed weapons truly believe that doing so would discourage the bad guys — and result in bad-guy defeat if they were not discouraged.
Those who see a different cause and effect at work say that more guns will mean more gun deaths and in-juries.
It is probably a good thing that both of these propositions are very difficult to demonstrate. There simply aren’t enough incidents involving deadly weapons that take place these days in the public buildings of Kansas to make either case.
I can’t think of any incident over the past 60 years in our courthouse or community college pertinent to either side of the question.
Fortunately, the days when Kansas was a lawless frontier now belong to history. (But even in our beginnings, courthouses and schools didn’t routinely attract armed hoodlums.)
One comes to the conclusion that this annual legislative effort to put more and more guns into the hands of more and more people is based more on ideology (and the self-serving desire to sell more guns and ammunition) than on our society’s need for deadly force to keep our people safe.
The NRA’s motivation is obvious. It is mainly fi-nanced by the gun and ammunition industries. Of course it seeks fewer controls on guns; of course it advocates ever-wider gun ownership.
But those who rally around the Second Amendment flag and elect the legislators the movement needs to succeed act from their own convictions and are as principled as their opponents.
So, the Register approaches the issue on neutral ground and argues against spending thousands upon thousands on metal scanners and armed guards, which would require a hefty tax increase, and also opposes those ominous barriers to entering our public buildings because they would increase public anxiety — and be an annoying nuisance.
For these reasons, the Senate should just say no to the House bill.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
