‘I don’t want to live like this’: Kansas City mayor calls for tighter gun laws after Uvalde
The other day on a flight, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas sat next to a high school special education teacher from Independence.
They talked about gun violence.
The woman, whose husband works at an ammunition plant, recounted to Lucas how terrifying it is, particularly for her students with special needs, to go through active shooter drills. And how terrified she is at the prospect of keeping herself and her students safe if an active shooter did come in.
“For us to just put our heads down and suggest nothing will happen and nothing needs to happen is to, I think, submit to more massacres of the types we saw recently,” Lucas told the Star on Tuesday, after a weekend spent talking about gun control on national outlets, like Face The Nation and The New York Times.
Lucas said while his powers to control guns on a local level are limited, he’s determined to keep the conversation alive on a state and federal level.
“I will be a very, very angry person if there is a massacre in Kansas City, and a massacre committed by a teenager who got an AR-15 when a very simple solution would’ve been having a longer waiting period or making it so that teenager could not have bought that firearm.”
‘We need to shout about it’
On May 24, an 18-year-old who bought an AR-15 just days earlier fired hundreds of rounds into two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers. Since then, Lucas said, more people, women in particular, are asking him to take action as mayor.
“I think people are scared for their children. I think they’re scared in a way that they haven’t been for years,” Lucas said. “And I’ll be damned if I don’t do something.”
But thanks to Missouri laws, he says there’s not much he can do at a local enforcement level.
Missouri prevents state and local law enforcement officials from enforcing certain federal gun laws. Missouri does not require a state background checks and doesn’t require that guns be registered. Gun owners and buyers aren’t required to have a license, and concealed carry is allowed without a permit.
If Lucas had the power to make one change tomorrow, he said he would again require concealed carry permits in Missouri. He called the 2007 reversal of that law “one of the most backwards positions that the Missouri legislature has absolutely ever made.”
He says it’s the reason for increased trafficking of firearms in the city, as well as a reduction of enforcement by police.
“I don’t give a damn about somebody’s AR-15. I do think that they should go through a background check before they buy it. I do think that they should actually be registered and permitted before they buy it, and I do think there should be remedies against them in the event it is stolen and used in some sort of criminal activity. This is just common sense, and we’re scared of it right now,” he said.
For now, Lucas said, he is doing all he can to keep the conversation going among lawmakers and in the media.
“After the Newtown massacre, we moved on. We just moved on. We can’t let that happen again, and so I’ll keep shouting about it,” he said. “ ... I think we need to shout about it all the time.”
Gun violence in Kansas City
In 2019, when Lucas was running for mayor, he talked of getting Kansas City below 100 homicides a year.
The following year, in 2020, Kansas City saw its deadliest year on record, with 182 killings. Most were committed with firearms. That same year, 631 people were shot in the city and lived.
“I ran for mayor talking about getting us below 100 homicides per year. We are absolutely nowhere close. Yeah, maybe I see that as a personal failure, but I’ll tell you what, if you double the police budget tomorrow, I don’t know if that actually solves it,” he said.
Nor does he think building a bigger jail solves it.
But, Lucas said, if tomorrow 80% of the legal guns moving around Kansas City were taken off the streets, he believes “you would see a difference immediately.”
While Kansas City continues to see the devastating toll of gun violence each year — with this year on pace to be as deadly as 2020 — Lucas said the city has taken some action on a local level.
A few years ago, the city passed an ordinance which takes guns out of the hands of minors and adjudicated domestic violence offenders, he said.
Then, in early 2020, Kansas City sued Jimenez Arms, alleging the gun manufacturer, along with firearms businesses and individuals, formed a trafficking ring that provided guns to known felons, though the lawsuit was later dropped when the company declared bankruptcy.
Kansas City, Illinois and Everytown for Gun Safety later sued the ATF for granting J.A. Industries — the predecessor to J.A. Industries — a firearms license. The lawsuit alleged that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted a deficient investigation before granting the license in a pattern of what they said was lax oversight by the federal agency.
In March 2022, the ATF issued a notice revoking the license of gun manufacturer J.A. Industries.
Lucas pointed to this, saying he’d like the city to file more lawsuits holding gun manufacturers accountable. If he could, he’d file hundreds of lawsuits.
Prevention
Several days before the Uvalde shooting, Lucas met with health department officials to talk about gun violence prevention programs.
He said intervention and prevention are key to reducing gun violence.
But Kansas City has failed to invest as many resources as other cities into such programs.
Aim4Peace, modeled on the national Cure Violence public health approach, represents one of Kansas City’s only viable strategies for reducing gun violence.
After running the program on minimum funding for years, including repeated budget cuts, City Hall in the most recent budget cycle increased the program’s funding to $250,000 and added several street outreach worker positions in addition to the hospital outreach team that already existed.
Asked about these programs, Lucas said determining the most stable sources comes during the budget process, which is still several months off. He added that city officials are continuing to look at ways to enhance programs through funding and grants.
Intervention and prevention come down to two things, Lucas said: ensuring people in crisis have a place to turn for help and treatment and making sure people don’t have the same ease of access to firearms that they currently do in Missouri.
“If we don’t talk about guns, if we don’t talk about the threat of guns, if we don’t talk about the flood of guns on our streets, we’re condemning ourselves to continue living like this forever,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to live like this.”
This story was originally published June 7, 2022 at 12:22 PM.
