Status Nightclub killings tragic, but aren’t cause for renewed gun control | Opinion
Whenever there’s an excuse, the gun-grabbers of the political world propose new controls on firearms owned by the law-abiding instead of focusing their ire on the criminals who pulled the trigger after laws already on the books went unenforced. It is easy to take a tough on crime pose by proposing new laws, a little more complicated to actually do some good.
In this case, Kansas felon Dontae Brooks allegedly killed two bystanders in an attempt to shoot someone else at the Kansas City nightclub called Status. Mayor Quinton Lucas and Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson have both said that they want tougher gun laws that they claim will help stop the next nightclub or Superbowl celebration shooting. Among their proposals are narrowing state self-defense laws and allowing cities to ban certain handguns and high-capacity magazines.
Let us start with the fact that the gun used to kill 29-year-old Eboni Silas and 24-year-old Tishauna Ballard was already illegal. Brooks is a convicted felon for whom possessing a firearm is illegal in both Kansas and Missouri by state law. Buying the gun was illegal, too. And if he took the illegal gun from his home in Kansas to the nightclub in Missouri, that is a violation of federal law.
It is unclear to me how adding new laws would make it any more likely that Brooks would respect them. Even Johnson acknowledges we need to do a better job enforcing the laws we have. Moreover, law enforcement did have a chance to stop this event from ever happening. Prosecutors in Kansas failed to convince a judge that Brooks should remain in jail while awaiting trial for his last allegedly criminal misuse of a firearm.
It is unclear to me how adding more gun laws would change the fact that our judges don’t think violating such laws is a serious enough and dangerous enough matter to take people off the streets when they are charged with gun crimes.
It is also unclear to me how Lucas’ and Johnson’s proposals would have stopped the Status shooter or the Super Bowl celebration gun play. Why would city laws have an impact on a man who has already allegedly broken state and federal law?
Union Station shooter not deterred
Would Brooks have worried about buying a legal gun when he was already buying it illegally, possessing it illegally, carrying it across state lines illegally and then using it to kill people, you know, illegally? I doubt it.
Would the six morons who opened fire outside Union Station, killing one and injuring dozens, have been deterred by a careful analysis of the nuances of self-defense law? Surely not. Indeed, one of them wasn’t deterred by a conviction for pulling a gun at a rec center. When some of the dozen guns brandished at the event were illegally purchased and others illegally possessed and security so loose that people were able to carry assault-style rifles into the celebration without anyone in charge being alerted, would handgun limitations have changed anything? When the magazines of at least some the guns used that day had bullets left over would cartridge capacity restrictions have changed anything? I wouldn’t bet on it.
It appears that what Johnson and Lucas are after is not to prevent gun violence from happening, but to make it more convenient to prosecute criminals after they have done their deadly work.
Let me suggest a different approach. I don’t disagree with Lucas and Johnson that every killing is an opportunity to assess what we are doing and make changes. People who believe in the importance of the Second Amendment and the right of the law-abiding to protect themselves from predators think that we should look at these crimes and see how their perpetrators could have been disarmed or kept off the streets in the first place.
Take the Status shooting, there were multiple opportunities to stop this tragic killing. Clearly we need to train judges to take gun crime more seriously. We need to more closely supervise repeat offenders awaiting trial. That’s something both Kansas and Missouri can do without grabbing guns from people who have never broken the law.
There were already off-duty law enforcement and metal detectors providing security in the area of Status Nightclub. Could we have done something to make Brooks easier to identify? Security was carding people that night, so maybe we could change the law so that felons’ ID tells security that they were someone who needed to be watched more closely? A scarlet F so to speak. Perhaps security could have given felons there that night a pat down in addition to the metal detectors. That might have saved two lives.
I am open to other ideas from Johnson and Lucas, but they must begin by restricting the rights of our criminal class, not narrowing constitutional protections for those of us who have always obeyed the law.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published February 28, 2026 at 5:08 AM.
