KINDER'S COMMENTARY: MANY WANT SAME PROTECTION ANTI-PROP B P-D GIVES EMPLOYEES

As the St. Louis County returns that crushed Proposition B (right to carry) rolled in late Tuesday night, notwithstanding its victory in 104 counties, a caller to a St. Louis radio station offered a telling point. This caller announced that he couldn't give his name, but said he worked for a certain news media outlet located along Tucker Boulevard in downtown St. Louis. The caller made other statements indicating that he was referring to the vigorously anti-Prop B St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The caller went on to say that top management long ago established a policy at this news media outlet that no woman should go outside to the parking lot after dark unless she is accompanied to her car by an armed guard. In fact, armed guards are posted at the doors of this building at all times as well.

What about Missourians, who, lacking the vast means of the Pulitzer media fortune, sought only the means to defend themselves?

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Three categories of packers: With the narrow defeat of Prop B, the fact will remain that there exist three categories of people carrying concealed weapons. These are a) law enforcement personnel, b) criminals and c) many thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens who carry. Anyone who thinks the latter are going to stop doing what they have done for years is demented.

As we learned with prohibition, it is an unhealthy thing for a republic such as ours to have laws on the books that are widely disobeyed.

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Ballot language decisive, or Bekki Cook to the rescue: A widespread view inside your state capitol, among both Republicans and Democrats, is this: Defeat for the right-to-carry measure can be laid at the feet of Secretary of State Bekki Cook in her rewritten ballot language. I don't say that with any malice, but rather as a statement of observable fact. The effort was lost when our courts ruled that the secretary of state has the power to write ballot language, even on a bill in which such language is specified, passed by the General Assembly and referred to a vote of the people. (The issue over which language would prevail got as far as the court of appeals before time ran out to take it all the way to the Supreme Court before the election.)

Here is the ballot language we in the Legislature approved when we passed the bill with overwhelming bipartisan support from nearly all areas of the state:

"Shall state or local law enforcement agencies be authorized to issue permits to law-abiding citizens at least twenty-one years of age to carry concealed firearms outside their home for personal protection after having passed a federal and state criminal background check and having completed a firearms safety training course approved by the Missouri Department of Public Safety?"

Here is the Secretary of State's rewritten language the courts said must appear on last week's ballot:

"Shall sheriffs, or in the case of St. Louis County, the chief of police, be required to permits to carry concealed firearms to citizens who apply if various statutory requirements are satisfied?

"Because of the discretion given to local law enforcement to verify the accuracy of applications, the costs are uncertain. Application fees are estimated to cover most costs for the first three years. Subsequently, local governments, as a whole, may incur costs from $500,000 to $1,000,000 annually, not covered by fees."

Such a difference is surely worth the bare, two-percent margin between winning and losing, and probably much more.

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