Louisville shooting shows we need big and small reforms of Ky gun laws. Start here. | Opinion
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Louisville Old National Bank shooting
Six people are dead and nine people were hospitalized after an active shooter opened fire in downtown Louisville on April 10.
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Americans want stricter gun controls. We don’t want all the guns. We just want some very basic, logical rules that might curb the current carnage.
About 71 percent of us want this, according to a national poll last year. That includes Republicans and existing gun owners.
“The poll by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households,” the Associated Press wrote. “Overall, 8 in 10 Americans perceive that gun violence is increasing around the country, and about two-thirds say it’s increasing in their state, though less than half believe it’s increasing in their community, the poll shows.”
We know it’s increasing in our state because on Monday, a deranged shooter killed five people at a Louisville bank. The victims, Deana Eckert, 57; Thomas Elliott, 63; Josh Barrick, 40; Juliana Farmer, 45; James Tutt, 64, deserved reform in their lives. Now it should be done in their memories.
But to show you exactly where democracy breaks down, where the will of the people is thwarted, look no further than the Kentucky General Assembly.
Petty politics
Kentucky has a lot of bad guns laws in place, including a nonsensical one from the 2000s which requires guns seized in criminal cases to be turned over to the Kentucky State Police for auctions to raise money for equipment, rather than being destroyed and taken off the street. Mayor Craig Greenberg has taken aim at that law in particular in public remarks since the shooting.
“Under current Kentucky law, the assault rifle that was used to murder five of our neighbors and shoot at rescuing police officers will one day be auctioned off,” he said at Tuesday’s press conference. “Think about that. That murder weapon will be back on the streets.”
This session, Democrats put forth a variety of commonsense reforms, including one that would overturn the gun sale requirement. But none of them saw the light of day because in a petty and historical tit for tat, Republicans basically refuse to even debate the vast majority of D-sponsored legislation.
In particular, I want to focus on two of the tiniest, most incremental steps that could make our lives safer.
In 2019 and 2020, there was a bipartisan push for red flag laws here, which allow guns to be taken from people in mental health and other crises. Research has found that in about 80% of cases, people who commit mass shootings or suicide speak of it in advance to family members or friends or via social media. Apparently, the Louisville shooter told at least one person they were feeling suicidal. California’s red flag law has been credited with preventing at least 58 potential mass shootings there. Suicide makes up almost half of gun deaths in the U.S.
Former Republican Sen. Paul Hornback joined with Democrat Morgan McGarvey to get the bill as far as the discussion stage. But the NRA opposed it, so that was that.
This year, Rep. Lisa Willner, D-Louisville, and Rep. Chad Aull, D-Lexington, dipped not even a toe, but a toenail back in the water with House Bill 79, a voluntary red flag law to allow people to self-report themselves onto a no-buy list with gun dealers.
“You can self-select to put yourself on a registry that prevents you from buying a firearm,” Aull said. “Then if you go through a bad patch and you try to buy a firearm, you would be prevented.”
That bill didn’t even get a committee hearing. Instead, legislators passed a bill to make Kentucky a Second Amendment Sanctuary, a nonsensical bit of performative politics that will be struck down here as it has in other states.
“We seem to be going more extreme,” Willner said. “But I’m wondering if this is an opportunity to pull back on that. I don’t know but I hope so.”
The other bill is House Bill 326, which would create an Office of Safer Communities, which would study gun violence and make evidence-based recommendations on the best ways to solve it. One of the most insidious things the NRA ever did was to convince their handmaidens in Congress to suppress federal funding on gun violence research, but Kentucky could do it on a much smaller scale. It also died before getting a hearing.
“I will continue to file this legislation,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Keturah Herron, D-Louisville. “I want to start to have this conversation. We are dealing with gun violence on a daily basis, it’s become normalized and it’s only brought to the forefront when it’s a mass shooting.”
These are tiny, tiny places to start that surely could not even threaten the paranoid death cult known as the NRA, right? It’s not like they’re going to take on the big problems, like too many assault rifles.
Paul Hornback thinks there are Republican legislators who may be ready to take a stand, but any proposal will have to come from the Republican side.
“Most people recognize it’s a problem,” he said. “There’s recognition by leadership and by the members that something needs to be done and that’s a starting point. Everything is tied to the money that the NRA gives, some members don’t want the heat. But something like this has to hit close to home for people to do something.”
Hornback noted that controversial legislation like sports betting or medical marijuana often takes years to pass. “I think reasonable people will decide that something needs to be done,” he said. “And I think something will happen.”
Control issues
The bigger problems are political strangleholds. Like the noose the NRA holds over politicians, the Republican General Assembly wants to keep a tight rein over big urban areas like Louisville and Lexington, which face bigger gun violence issues, but lack the tools to fight them.
Two Black legislators from Nashville and Memphis tried to make the same point to the GOP majority in Tennessee after a school shooting there two weeks ago and got expelled for their efforts. As NYT columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on Tuesday, “Republicans appeared more outraged by direct engagement with voters than they are by gun violence.”
Kentucky must to do better.
Let’s get back to the law on gun sales. Lexington and Louisville have long opposed it; in 2000, the city of Lexington tried to skirt the law by giving the guns to a federal agency for destruction instead, but the Attorney General’s office overruled it.
In a 2021 investigation, the Courier-Journal found that 31 of those guns resurfaced in later criminal cases. Louisville now removes the firing pins before sending the guns over.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg addressed the problem on Tuesday morning in an interview with CBS Mornings and in a subsequent press conference.
“So many people across our city, across our country want action,” he said. “We must call on our state legislatures to give cities like Louisville the autonomy to control our own destiny with respect to reducing this gun violence epidemic. We need help from Congress to pass legislation that can give us more tools and abilities to try to prevent acts like yesterday from never happening again in Louisville, in Nashville, in any city in American. We need to come together with support and love and prayer for those who are still recovering, and then we need to come together to take action.”
This story was originally published April 11, 2023 at 12:49 PM.
