Not only can you wander around anywhere in the Sunflower State with a gun in your pants, you don’t even need any kind of training or licensing at all. If you are what my friends in Fairfax call a ‘law-abiding’ person, go into a gun shop, buy a banger, stick some ammo into it and you’re ready to defend yourself and everyone against all enemies – foreign, domestic or anything else. And the best news of all is that if you’re 21 years old, you can bring your gun into the most dangerous environment where nobody should be walking around unarmed, namely, college campuses because that’s where the threats to your safety and the safety of others can always be found.
Back in 2013 the State Legislature passed a law allowing concealed-carry (CCW) in most public venues within the state. They gave state college campuses until July 1st of this year to comply, but the clock has now run out. Then in 2015 the same bunch of fools in the State House erased the law which required anyone applying for CCW to first take an eight-hour training course, as if sitting around in someone’s back yard and talking about the last time you shot a squirrel or a skunk constitutes training of any kind.
Now the last time I looked at my trusty Road Atlas, Kansas City straddles the Kansas border, and the rate of gun violence in that city increased by 64 percent from 2014 to 2016 and is on track this year to set a new record by at least 50 percent more shootings over the total from last year. Of course the number of shootings in KC and throughout the state would probably be much higher if the law-abiding state residents weren’t all walking around with their guns. Remember a little story called The Wizard of Oz? There’s a reason Dorothy lived in Kansas.
In the midst of all this nuttiness, however, there’s still a thin sliver of sanity represented by a group of Jayhawks at the University of Kansas who have come together to try and get their campus to once again become a gun-free zone. Known as #FAILCAMPUSCARRY, they have a website and a Facebook page, both of which carry a very simple message, namely, “that the presence of guns threatens the safety of students, employees, and visitors of our campuses.” What? College campuses, public hospitals and other venues are threatened, not protected by guns? Come on, this can’t be true.
But in fact, it is true. And it’s not only true of schools and hospitals, it’s true of everywhere else. The evidence that a gun represents a threat to public safety is overwhelming, unless the gun is in the hands of someone who has been rigorously trained and certified to use the gun. But in Kansas there’s no training, there’s no certification, there’s nothing.
The fail-campus group has discovered that a series of meetings have evidently occurred between the State Board of Regents and the NRA, meetings ostensibly to make sure that the spread of CCW to college campuses will be done in a manner that will insure the public safety because students will be able to attend classes with their guns. That the NRA state rep is advising the Regents in closed-door meetings is an insult to anyone with an IQ above the level of idiot, and is an utter failure of the Regents to represent the public trust.
It will cost the fail-campus group more than $3,000 to get their hands on the correspondence between the Regents and the NRA, but you can help by sending a donation to their GoFundMe account. The group is also trying to push legislation that will roll back CCW on Kansas campuses, even if the chances of an emergence of sanity in the Land of Oz are probably next to nil.
But sometimes to take a great stride you start with a single step, and #FAILCAMPUSCARRY is where that step begins.
