As of Wednesday, March 13, gun control politicians had introduced four new anti-Second Amendment bills back-to-back in the Kansas Senate. Each of these attacks on our Second Amendment freedoms was requested by Democrat Senator Cindy Holscher of Johnson County and all have been referred to the Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs. We’re thankful this committee has strong pro-Second Amendment leadership, but we can’t take anything for granted! If your Senator sits on this committee, please contact them immediately.
Short Title: Requiring a concealed carry license to lawfully carry a concealed handgun and exempting colleges and universities from the public buildings requirements under the personal and family protection act.
If a legislator wanted to say that the lives of 18-20 year old Kansans and anyone present on a college or university campus are less valuable than those of others, we’d be hard pressed to find a clearer way to say it than the way this bill is written.
This horrible bill would eliminate constitutional carry in Kansas at a time when states across the nation are following our lead in droves by passing constitutional carry. Currently, 29 states have passed constitutional carry. We were one of the first states to pass this important protection for firearm owners wishing to carry a firearm for self defense. Since then, Kansas has been a proving ground for years, showing the nation that protecting the ability of law-abiding firearm owners to defend themselves does not give criminals cover for illegal activity. Instead, constitutional carry does exactly the opposite by helping ensure that victims are allowed to level the field by having access to the most effective tools of self defense.
Kansas has had concealed carry on campus for many years now. If we use the terminology of the fragile, sky-is-falling politicians and academics who opposed campus carry passage back in the day, it’s safe to say the ‘experiment’ worked. This bill would undo years of proven results by undermining the ability of faculty, adult students, administrators, and visitors to carry a firearm on campus. In fact, it would make campuses which are often soft targets for violent attack even easier marks by preventing law-abiding firearm owners from carrying while removing any requirement that the school have adequate security measures like armed security or metal detectors in place.
This bill takes the sick reasoning that we can somehow trust violent criminals to not break the law, but can’t trust young adults who can vote and serve in the military a step farther by also removing references to the ‘provisional’ concealed carry permits currently available to individuals 18-20 years old. These provisional permits were created to allow 18-20 year old adults to obtain a concealed carry permit with the same benefits within state boundaries available to those holding a standard permit while avoiding a situation where other states might rescind their reciprocity with our concealed carry permits because we allow those under 21 to carry. Whether the bill upsets this balance or completely eliminates the provisional licenses and prohibits anyone under 21 from carrying a concealed firearm at all, the effort is not only misguided, it’s unconstitutional.
This portion of the bill applies to 18-20 year old Kansans who have not broken the law, have voluntarily gone through at least an 8-hour state-approved firearm safety course that also covers self defense law, and have submitted themselves to a background check and fingerprints all to carry the same firearm concealed they could already open carry on their hip. With hundreds or perhaps even thousands of young adults carrying a firearm every day under a provisional permit, we have not seen evidence of a single individual with a provisional permit being charged with a violent crime in our state. And you can count on that making headlines if it happened. It’s absolutely insane that anyone would even consider it logical or legal to strip an entire class of adults of rights they have been actively exercising to no one’s harm. If protecting violent criminals from the potential of being confronted by a young man or woman who doesn’t want to be their next victim is that important to these legislators, they should just be honest and say so.
Short Title: Requiring criminal history record checks for all sales of firearms and providing criminal penalties for violations thereof.
We won’t spend a lot of time on this one since the title is pretty descriptive. Essentially, this bill would require that any transfer of a firearm between individuals — not just when a federal firearm license (FFL) holder is involved — would require the use of a criminal background check. If passed, this bill would make Kansas law far more restrictive even than federal law, while making Kansans no safer. The fact remains, criminals do not voluntarily subject themselves to background checks to purchase a firearm and there will always be ways for them to get around background check requirements like they already do today by enlisting a straw purchaser to undergo the background check for them, steal the firearm from its rightful owner, or obtain a firearm from the black market.
Short Title: Prohibiting persons under 21 years of age from purchasing and possessing semiautomatic rifles with high capacity ammunition magazines.
Where to even start…
Under this bill, anyone under the age of 21 who purchases or even possesses a semiautomatic rifle with a so-called “high capacity ammunition magazine” would be guilty of violating criminal use of weapons statutes. There are no exceptions for individuals in Kansas who already own any number of the most popular rifles in America today so this bill would immediately criminalize the actions of tens-of-thousands of law-abiding adult Kansas firearm owners by banning firearms already in their possession. The very introduction of such legislation is an affront to the oath of office legislators take to uphold the Constitution.
As written, the bill treats a 19 or 20 year old competitive shooter with a decade of experience and national or even international championships exactly the same as known, convicted violent criminals. The upstanding adult competitive shooter described above — or thousands of everyday Kansas young men and women who own a rifle for hunting, sporting, or other lawful purpose — would be guilty of a felony significantly more serious than someone who illegally sells firearms to those addicted to controlled substances or to people who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, and they would be treated under the law exactly the same as an armed fugitive from justice, a violent aggressor under a restraining order for threatening an intimate partner, or a criminal convicted of domestic violence.
This bill would also add a new definition to statute for “high capacity ammunition magazine” and define this arbitrary term as any “ammunition feeding device that physically extends below the bottom of the grip of a firearm when fully seated into such firearm.” Under this bill, many of the most common magazines on the market today would be considered “high capacity”. Another ridiculous technical flaw with this bill shows the ignorance of those pushing this legislation: The vast majority of semiautomatic rifles on the market today do not have removable magazines located within the grip of the firearm. Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with modern rifles could tell you that the definition in the measure is not based on any reasonable standard or in reality of any kind. We can only hope that this outrageous bill goes right back to whatever alternate reality the legislators who introduced it are living in because we don’t want it here!
Given that there are already federal restrictions that limit the ability of minors to possess and carry specific kinds of firearms in many situations, this bill singles out and specifically targets adults ages 18 through 21 who are not guilty of any other crime. This bill attempts to make all voting-age adults under 21 who own a semiautomatic rifle with a magazine over an arbitrary length felons overnight.
As a final note, this bill apparently only criminalizes people who have been adults for up to three years for the possession or carrying of semiautomatic rifles, not semiautomatic shotguns. Again, we’re not sure where the logic got left, but it didn’t make it anywhere close to the Statehouse.
Short Title: Creating the crime of unlawful storage of a firearm and providing criminal penalties for violations thereof.
This bill creates a new crime of unlawful storage of a firearm. We’ve talked many times about why we’re opposed to legislation like this so our opposition will not come as a surprise to our supporters. We wholeheartedly support safe storage of firearms and promote resources and training available from organizations like the NSSF on safe storage practices because as a firearm owner you are responsible for knowing how to properly handle your firearms and how to secure them in your home. And we have a long history of encouraging safe storage practices as part of our mission to ensure that each new generation learns effective firearm safety. However, we cannot support unconstitutional and unreasonable efforts by gun-confiscation politicians to create and enforce arbitrary storage requirements on law-abiding Kansan through government fiat and the threat of severe criminal penalties. Every Kansan’s situation and stage of life is unique. Claiming that every Kansas firearm owner fits in a nice little mold and has exactly the same lifestyle is laughable so the hubris politicians have in claiming that government knows better than responsible firearm owners what steps are needed to keep their firearms out of the wrong hands is troubling.
While this attack has surfaced in many legislatures across the country, this specific bill goes a step beyond regulating firearm storage and extends the crime to include storage of stun guns as well. Not only are the legislators who introduced this bill unashamedly attempting to make it more difficult to access a legally-owned firearm when needed for self-defense, they are specifically choosing to make it apply to stun guns, disproportionately impacting women and others who refuse to be victims and want to defend themselves with a less-lethal alternative to a firearm. Not only would an individual who owns a firearm be forced under this law to keep their firearm locked away and less accessible anytime it is not on their person or in their immediate use, it would require anyone who owns a stun gun to purchase a lockbox of some kind to secure their stun gun or risk a $1,000 fine anytime the stun gun is not physically on their person or in a purse physically under the individual’s control.
Our understanding of this bill is that if you carry a firearm or stun gun in your purse, briefcase, or backpack and leave your bag on the kitchen counter when you come home from grocery shopping while you run back to the car for another load of groceries, you would be in violation of the law and in jeopardy of being fined if caught. Even if no one was ever in danger or even in the house with you.
Like the bill we already talked about above, this bill would also add a new definition to statute for “high capacity ammunition magazine” and defines this arbitrary term as any “ammunition feeding device that physically extends below the bottom of the grip of a firearm when fully seated into such firearm.” Under this bill, many of the most common magazines on the market today would be considered “high capacity”. Additionally, it is unclear from a layperson’s reading of this bill, but could be argued that having a firearm with a more compact grip like a Glock 26 stored in your home outside of a locked box with a magazine intended for a Glock 17 would open the owner up to higher fines because the magazine would protrude from the end of the grip even though it is standard issue for a larger Glock 17 chambered in the same caliber.
Making it more difficult for law-abiding Kansans to defend themselves is not the solution to crime. Disarming potential victims and putting as many roadblocks in their path to successful self-defense is outrageous. The Kansas State Rifle Association cannot stand idly by while Kansas Legislators attempt to make life easier for violent criminals on our streets, on our college campuses, and even illegally entering our homes.
While we hope and expect every one of these terrible bills to be dead on arrival, we can never be absolutely sure and must remain vigilant.
Remember when people laughed at us and claimed there is no need for an amendment to our Kansas Constitution further-protecting the right to keep and bear arms and subjecting attempted violations to strict judicial scrutiny? The very fact that legislators think it will gain them votes in left-leaning Johnson County districts to introduce legislation that would make many of our most upstanding citizens criminals overnight proves our point for us that now is the time to take decisive action in defense of freedom.
Want to do even more to defend your Second Amendment freedoms here in Kansas? Consider joining the Kansas State Rifle Association today!
