Editorial Roundup: Missouri
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. August 17, 2023.
Editorial: State gun laws help, but cross-state trafficking shows need for federal action
Illinois’ latest restrictions on semi-automatic weapons, which were upheld by the state’s Supreme Court last week, may yet fall in pending federal litigation. But even if they remain intact, the fact that Illinois is surrounded by states with loose gun laws — none looser than Missouri’s — will continue to diminish the effectiveness of those restrictions.
That’s not to say there’s no correlation between state-level gun policies and a state’s gun violence rates. In fact, across America, the correlation is dramatic, a phenomenon for which Missouri is a national poster-child. (More on that in a moment.)
But more than half of all traced guns recovered in Illinois came from surrounding states, including Missouri, according to government data. That alone destroys the argument of critics who point to Chicago’s violence as evidence that strict gun laws like those in Illinois can’t work.
It drives home the need for serious, comprehensive federal gun reform laws to undergird the current wide-ranging patchwork of state laws (or lack of them, in states like Missouri). Addressing the crisis on a national level is a political impossibility at the moment, but the longer America accepts this unacceptable situation, the higher the body count will rise.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, signed the Protect Our Communities Act into law in January, following last year’s mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park that killed seven.
The law bans sale or possession of dozens of styles of semi-automatic handguns and rifles, including the AR-15-style rifles so popular with mass shooters, which was used in the Highland Park massacre. It also limits rifle ammunition capacity to 10 rounds and handguns to 15 rounds.
The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday upheld the law 4-3. It rejected a challenge that was brought not on Second Amendment grounds, but on the argument that the law violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, in that it allowed those who already owned such guns to keep them while barring new possession for others. Second Amendment challenges to the law are still pending in federal courts — and could be more successful in knocking down the law, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s hostility in recent years toward even the most common-sense gun restrictions, and the impact of that trend on the lower courts.
Under separate statutes previously in place, Illinois requires universal background checks for gun purchases, provides a red-flag law to legally disarm potentially unstable people, requires permits to carry guns in public, bars people convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from having guns, and more. Missouri does none of these things.
The difference shows in the two states’ gun mortality rates: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Missouri’s rate of more than 23 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2021 puts it in the top 10 states in America. The rate has been among the top for almost the past decade, coinciding with the start of Jefferson City’s current gun-law-loosening binge. That trend took a turn for the surreal this year, when the Legislature couldn’t even muster the political will to back the proposition that children shouldn’t be permitted to carry firearms around in public.
Illinois’ 2021 rate was just over 16 per 100,000 — a little over the national average, which is also where the state has tended to be in the past decade. Stats from some recent years show an even wider cross-state discrepancy between Missouri and Illinois, of around 2:1.
If that indicates that strong state gun laws do in fact work, other data hints at a drawback to that state-level approach in a nation without restrictions in traversing state borders.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reports that, of almost 14,800 guns recovered by law enforcement in Illinois in 2021 and traced to their source, fully 7,800, or about 53%, came from other states. Most were from neighboring Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin and Kentucky, all of which have notably lax gun laws.
Put another way: Illinois’ relatively modest gun death rate — clearly aided by that state’s strong state gun laws — would likely be even lower today if not for the loose gun laws of Missouri and its other neighboring states.
How’s that for a lousy neighbor?
The inability of Congress to move almost anything in the way of significant federal gun legislation, even in the wake of devastating national gun tragedies, is, for the moment, intractable.
The Biden administration last year did manage to pass what was hailed as the first significant federal gun legislation in three decades, but it mostly just nibbled at the edges of issues like red-flag laws and background checks. And even those baby-steps drew intense opposition from the gun lobby and Republican politicians.
But issues that look immovable to one generation have a way of becoming fluid to the next. Consider how unthinkable today’s societal and legal attitudes toward same-sex relationships and marijuana would have been even a few years ago.
Whatever tipping point it is that will bring that kind of clarity, at last, to the necessity of instituting strong federal firearms regulations hasn’t yet been reached, and won’t be anytime soon. As a bleeding nation waits to come to its senses, state laws like those in Illinois — sea walls against the flood of weapons that Missouri and other red states have loosed — will have to suffice.
END