The idea of preemption is that it prevents there from being an unnavigable patchwork of gun control laws in a given state. After all, people move between towns pretty regularly. The last thing you need is someone who thinks they’re complying with the law only to find out they’re in the wrong city for that particular action.
However, anti-gunners hate preemption. They want local communities to be able to do just that.
One of those anti-gunners is apparently the mayor of Kansas City, and he is decrying preemption.
On Friday, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas noted that for six years Missouri cities have been prevented from enacting their own gun control measures, something he said hamstrings him in addressing the shootings and killings that plague the city.
The comment came days after a particularly violent weekend in Kansas City made national news, and hours before two teenagers were shot and killed leaving a Ramadan service later that night.
Lucas said he would like to be able to promote city ordinances to stop easy access to illegal firearms that flood the streets. But he can’t, because the Missouri General Assembly in 2014 preempted cities from making their own gun laws.
And at the statehouse, advocates for stricter gun laws have hit a wall for years before a Republican-dominated legislature that has pushed instead to loosen gun restrictions.
“Let us find a way to try to save the babies who are dying on our streets, each and every day,” Lucas said. Kansas City had recorded 53 homicides as of Friday, after setting a record of 182 in 2020, according to data maintained by The Star.
“This isn’t politics, this is life and death,” Lucas said. “And the fact that I’m one Black man of many Black people who personally know victims of homicide in recent years, it shouldn’t be like that. It’s going to continue to be like that till we’re allowed to actually self-determine how we want to be safe in this community.”
Lucas is trying to paint himself as being in a tough spot. I mean, gun violence is raging and he can’t do anything about it because the evil Republicans in the state legislature won’t let him.
However, that’s just spin.
See, gun control doesn’t really work. However, there are a lot of other things that actually do. There are programs where you can actually nip violent crime–not just gun violence but all violence–in the bud.
This is something Lucas could at least try to implement without the state legislature. It’s something that he could urge the state legislature to try beyond the confines of Kansas City. This doesn’t even necessarily come from a pro-gun source.
So why isn’t it?
Honestly, much of it is because Democrats have decided that the only possible solution to gun violence is gun control. They forget that “gun” is the adjective describing a kind of violence. It’s not the instigator of said violence. If you address violence in general, you address not just gun violence but also knife violence, fist violence, and so on.
It’s a win all across the board.
Yet there’s been no mention of it from any number of Democrats complaining about not being able to address the scourge of gun violence. Why not?
Because it’s never really been about violence. See, they don’t actually care about violence. That’s about the little people and they don’t actually give a damn about them.
If they addressed violent crime by actually trying to prevent it, they couldn’t stand on their soapbox about how evil guns are. They don’t like that you or I have guns and they want to change that. They don’t care about the criminals being armed, they care about you being armed.
Hell, Lucas likely knows that the criminals aren’t buying guns in gun stores or buying them from law-abiding citizens. They’re obtaining them through illicit means, which means nothing he does will stop that. He doesn’t care because despite his “life or death” rhetoric, it’s not about that.
If it was, he’d look at proven programs that can reduce violent crime without infringing on anyone’s rights. The fact that he won’t tells us all we need to know.
