‘Kansas Gun Rights Preservation’ act: lame and tone-deaf after Chiefs rally shooting | Opinion

Give gun lovers in the Kansas Legislature their due: They have impeccable timing.

On Wednesday of last week, Johnson County mom and DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan was killed at the Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally, in a mass shooting that also injured multiple children. Yes, the shooting happened on the Missouri side of the state line. But it was every bit as much a Kansas tragedy. Schools at least as far away as Lawrence offered counseling to students and their families who might have witnessed the violence.

Then, the next day, the House Committee on Federal and State Affairs — at the request of state Rep. Michael Houser of Columbus — introduced a new bill: the Kansas Gun Rights Preservation Act. It would prohibit law enforcement agencies from participating “in any way” in the enforcement of federal gun laws.

So much for thoughts and prayers.

I didn’t expect lawmakers to rush new gun regulations into being, obviously. Our GOP-led legislative branch has a (depending on the issue) veto-proof majority, and no obvious indication to get crossways with gun owners or their lobbyists. We also know by now — after Sandy Hook, after Uvalde — that there is simply no mass shooting so horrible, no victims so innocent, no disruption to society so intolerable that it can motivate the firearms fundamentalists to choose life.

Guns ruin everything. And by God, it’s apparently necessary that we keep letting them ruin everything.

But even Missouri Republicans knew enough to read the room and put a pause on gun rights legislation after such a high-profile horror. In Kansas, apparently, we don’t have quite that level of emotional sophistication.

Then again, it’s not much of a surprise coming from Houser. He’s been a vocal proponent of tough-guy gun legislation in Topeka going back at least a decade.

Back in 2014, for example, he pushed an amendment to let Kansans — even ones without concealed carry permits — keep loaded handguns in their cars. Why? Because transporting unloaded guns would leave drivers defenseless in case of an attack.

“Say you’re going to get jacked or something … in my younger days, I’d just beat down somebody, but I can’t do that anymore, so I have to have (a gun) for self-defense,” Houser said at the time.

Sure, dude.

More recently, in 2019, Houser helped lead the effort to ban Kansas authorities from cooperating with any red flag laws to keep guns out of the hands of people who had shown evidence of being a threat to themselves or others when friends or family sound the alarm about such a threat.

Houser was also part of a group of Kansas legislators who, that same year, wrote then-President Donald Trump asking him to veto any federal red flag legislation. “These evil acts are inexplicable and must be stopped,” they said of mass shootings.

America’s routine massacres aren’t really that inexplicable, though. Evil is everywhere. Guns aren’t. We have more gun deaths here than other developed countries because we have more guns. A lot more. It’s pretty simple!

Rhetoric aside, Houser’s new bill would be a boon to folks who don’t actually have an interest in stopping, or even much limiting, all that violence.

It wouldn’t just prohibit Kansas law enforcement agencies from assisting federal gun investigations “against a law-abiding citizen.” It would let aggrieved gun owners sue those agencies and their officers for up to $50,000.

That makes the legislation pretty similar to the Second Amendment Preservation Act that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed back in 2021. A federal judge struck down the law last March. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Missouri’s appeal in October.

“At best, this statute causes confusion among state law enforcement officials who are deputized for federal task force operations, and at worst, is unconstitutional on its face,” U.S. District Judge Brian Wimes wrote in March.

Bills introduced this late in the legislative session don’t typically have much of a path forward, and no hearings are scheduled on this latest offering. Which means that the Kansas Gun Rights Preservation Act isn’t just badly timed. It’s also a vice-signaling waste of time. All it has accomplished is to prove that gun-loving Kansas politicians are tone-deaf at best — and, at worst, utterly indifferent to the violence all around us.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.