The more detail that emerges about the assailant in last week’s St. Louis school shooting, the more clear it becomes that his deadly violence was, in real ways, abetted by Missouri’s Legislature. Conservative lawmakers have spent more than a decade preventing or assertively tearing down every legal safeguard that might have stopped Orlando Harris from obtaining his weapon. Each step along the path that led to the deaths of two innocent people was cleared by pro-gun lawmakers in Jefferson City, who have worked hard to ensure their state has among the loosest gun laws in the country. And years’ worth of data indicates there are many other victims of their extremism.
Harris broke into the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and Collegiate School of Medicine & Bioscience on Monday armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. He managed to kill student Alexzandria Bell, 15, and teacher Jean Kuczka, 61, and wound several others before police killed him.
Unlike the grade school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May, no one this time can point to failures at the scene as a contributing factor. Police responded quickly and professionally to stop the rampage almost immediately. Before the attack, the shooter’s family went to extraordinary lengths to deny him access to a gun and to address his mental health issues. The school was well-secured, and well-prepared teachers were able to protect most of the students. Everyone did everything right.
Everyone, that is, except the Missouri elected officials ultimately responsible for protecting all of them. Consider:
• When a licensed gun dealer refused to sell Harris a gun on Oct. 8 because he couldn’t pass the federally required background check, the Legislature had already made sure that he could instead buy one from a private seller who had no legal obligation to run such a check.
• When Harris’ family called the police on Oct. 15, fearing that his mental state made it dangerous for him to be armed, the Legislature had already ensured there was no red-flag law in place that would have allowed them to get a court order removing the gun.
• Harris was 19, an age at which even mentally healthy people can be unpredictable. In recognition of that fact, numerous states, including Illinois, have raised their minimum age to buy all firearms to 21. But in Missouri, 18-year-olds can still buy semi-automatic weapons like the one Harris bought.
• Because Missouri doesn’t require permits to carry guns in most public spaces for anyone 19 or older, Harris theoretically didn’t even face the threat of being stopped and questioned as he transported his weapon on the street outside the school.
If a state intentionally designed its laws to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to lay their hands on deadly firearms, that would look pretty much like Missouri’s laws today. This isn’t an accident or an oversight. It’s the result of a long campaign by Republican state politicians to methodically eliminate anything that their most extreme constituents might define as gun control.
The most glaring example is on the issue of background checks, which in this case worked the way it was supposed to — until Missouri law came into play.
Federal law says anyone who buys a weapon from a federally licensed gun dealer must submit to a background check to ensure that person isn’t legally prohibited from having one. Police haven’t specified why Harris failed the background check by the St. Charles gun dealer he tried to buy from two weeks before the shooting. But according to police, Harris had been committed at one point for his mental health issues, which is one element that can prohibit a gun sale.
That could have and should have been the end of it — except that Missouri, like some other red states, provides an extraordinary loophole for unfit people seeking weapons: They can go to a private seller, who doesn’t fall under federal background-check requirements, and buy the weapon, no questions asked.
Missouri used to have a universal-background check requirement for purchases of handguns, but the Legislature repealed it in 2007. Even if that particular law wouldn’t have prevented Harris’ purchase (because it was a rifle rather than a handgun), there’s been nothing to stop lawmakers from instituting a universal background check of all gun purchases, as other states have.
In Illinois, for example, even someone who buys from a private seller has to present a state Firearms Owners’ Identification Card, which means that person has undergone a background check by the state police. The private seller is required to contact the state police to confirm that the card-holder is still eligible to buy, and only then can sell.
It’s a reasonable system to prevent someone like Harris from arming up. And Missouri’s deliberate lack of such a system helps explain why it has almost twice the firearms death rate that Illinois does. In fact, Missouri’s rate today is consistently among the worst of any state — and far worse than it was just a dozen years ago.
Gov. Mike Parson’s astonishing comment on Thursday indicates just how much Missouri’s Republican leadership still doesn’t get it: “You got a criminal that committed a criminal act, and all the laws in the world are not going to stop those things.”
So what’s the point of having any laws at all? That a governor from the “law and order” party (and a former sheriff, no less) would spout such nonsense shows, once again, that Missouri’s Republican politicians are so deep down the gun-culture rabbit hole that they can’t even think straight on this topic. Voters should keep the stunning images from the school grounds foremost in their minds on Nov. 8 and remember: Elections have consequences.
____
