Kobach, Colyer compete over who loves the NRA more. Is that what Kansas voters want?
Is the recent movement in public opinion on gun laws the harbinger of another #MeToo or another Arab Spring? We still don’t know if the shift is temporary or a tipping point.
But Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer and Secretary of State Kris Kobach, both Republicans who are running for governor, seem to be betting that it’s only a blip as they compete for gold stars from the National Rifle Association.
A new CNN poll taken after the massacre of 17 students and teachers in Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, shows a big shift in a short time: Seventy percent of those surveyed now support stricter gun laws. That’s up from 52 percent in October, right after 58 people were fatally shot in Las Vegas, and it’s the highest level of support for tightening restrictions since 1993.
All the same, Kobach is trying to get the NRA to hold its annual convention in Kansas. He wrote in a Breitbart column, “The time has come for schools to allow willing teachers, coaches, and staff to be armed.” Armed school resource officers, Kobach wrote, “are not enough ... If there are multiple armed teachers and staff in a school, then the response time can be reduced to seconds, rather than minutes.” Not only that, but states that already “permit teachers to carry need to revisit their laws to ensure that it is not too difficult for teachers who want approval to receive it.”
Insurance companies have said they wouldn’t insure schools where teachers are armed because it would increase their liability. For them, the calculus is not political, but actuarial. Mark Desetti, legislative director of the Kansas National Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, has called the suggestion both absurd and malign: “The idea, well we’ll give these teachers a bonus, are you kidding me? We’re 42nd in the nation, we don’t pay teachers to begin with, and now we’re saying, ‘Well, if you’re willing to kill somebody, we’ll give you a bonus.’ I have never been so insulted, as an educator myself of 13 years in the classroom, by a proposal in my entire teaching career.”
Colyer doesn’t have the long record of fealty to the NRA that Kobach has; the secretary of state helped write a 2013 state law that gives firearms made in Kansas that never leave the state an exemption from federal regulation. But the new governor has also said he’s open to teachers packing heat, telling Axios, “This may be (a) good solution.”
Kansans are such strong proponents of unfettered Second Amendment rights that they may respond to the shift with more of the fear of imminent gun confiscation that increased sales and boosted gun manufacturers throughout the Obama years — and that have left sellers with surplus stock since Donald Trump’s election. After all, an attempt to roll back the law allowing concealed firearms on college campuses failed last year in Kansas, even if a law that allowed public hospitals to ban concealed firearms did pass.
Maybe the national momentum will only reinforce the worry that any limits on gun rights mean the government is coming for your hunting rifle or handgun.
But in the general election, there is also some risk in responding to the current moment with the same old salutes to the gun lobby.
This story was originally published February 27, 2018 at 4:57 PM with the headline "Kobach, Colyer compete over who loves the NRA more. Is that what Kansas voters want?."