KINDER'S COMMENTARY: LAWMAKER'S WORTH ISN'T PART OF PAY ISSUE

January goes out in your state Capitol with the rather startling news that we lawmakers somehow managed to do the right thing: We just said no to the unreasonably high recommendations of the Commission on the Compensation of Elected Officials. Listening to an early-morning radio broadcast this week, it struck me that veteran statehouse newsman Jim Wolfe got it exactly right. He observed that any discussion of "what lawmakers are worth" is irrelevant. Wolfe said that for the finest among them, there isn't enough money in the state of Missouri to measure their contributions, and those lawmakers, who in most cases could make far more if engaged full-time in private life, "aren't here for the paycheck."

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At Tuesday's hearing on Senate Bill 159, the Senate Committee on Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence heard testimony on my bill to extend to Missourians the rights enjoyed by citizens of 30 other states: The right to apply to law enforcement authorities to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. I pointed out to the committee the results of last year's famous study on this topic published by the University of Chicago. The work of a law professor and an economics professor who set out to debunk the case for conceal/carry, the evidence led them to an opposite conclusion.

The most interesting result of this study was the distinguished authors' conclusion as to what had happened in conceal/carry states. In states that have the law, crimes against persons -- rape, assault, murder -- had dropped significantly, while crimes against property -- burglary, auto theft -- had actually risen. This is a fascinating datum that suggests a sort of rational calculation on the part of the criminal element -- a cost-benefit analysis, if you will. Prior top passage of conceal/carry, the criminal in states such as Missouri enjoys a government-certified guarantee of a disarmed victim. Pass this law and all of a sudden that guarantee is removed, replaced with considerable doubt in the criminal's mind as to whether his potential victim will be armed or not. The question then becomes, "Who should be doubtful and fearful, the criminal or the prey he stalks?"

For us proponents, reference was also made to the historical origins of the ban on concealed weapons, and here we have another absolutely fascinating, and little-known, historical datum. The legal ban on conceal/carry, as with the origin of gun-control measures generally, dates back to the Jim Crow laws from the Reconstruction era. That's right: Scholars have demonstrated that viciously bigoted laws were passed more than a hundred years ago by segregationist majorities bent on leaving black Americans unarmed and defenseless to attack. To liberal opponents of conceal/carry, I say, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

First to testify in favor was a retired, 30-year veteran of the St. Louis police department. He spent most of his career in the most dangerous sector of the city relating that he had taken "literally hundreds of innocent victims to the morgue, who through no fault of their own found themselves in wrong place at the wrong time. I have always believed that if they could have had a chance to defend themselves, so many of them not only would have lived, but would never have been attacked in the first place." This distinguished lawman also testified to another interesting phenomenon in the conceal/carry debate: Overwhelming support among rank-and-file police for the bill, in the face of politically correct opposition to conceal/carry among chiefs of police more attuned to elite opinion. Sign me up with the populists.

We have the votes, by overwhelming margins in both House and Senate, to pass this bill and put it on the governor's desk. I say let's do it and force this governor to make good on his veto threat. Every year in the past four, another state or two passes this measure. Since 1994, Democratic governors have signed it into law in Kentucky and Tennessee. Here's hoping Missourians aren't the last in the nation to gain this extension of the fundamental, God-given right of self-defense.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.