Senate obstinacy on gun bill typifies LA failure

In an all-too-familiar story, once again Louisiana looks to let itself get left behind as large swaths of the country move forward.

This time, it’s on the issue of concealed carry of handguns without a permit for most individuals. Buoyed by last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared firearm ownership a constitutional right that allowed citizens to carry concealed firearms for self-defense, allowing only reasonable state regulation to prevent their use otherwise, now more than half the states have instituted what has become termed “constitutional carry” laws of this nature, with almost all adopting these in the past dozen years.

But not Louisiana, even though Republican state Rep. Danny McCormick ever since his election annually has introduced a steady stream of legislation to bring this into being. And the Louisiana Senate has become the biggest obstacle even as it has progressed through the House over time. His first two attempts never got out of House committee but the next exited the House teetering on a two-thirds majority (realistically, pro-Second Amendment-in-words-only con man Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards would veto his if given a chance) only never to come to a Senate floor vote.

The same stalling strategy may happen again, although a small portion of the blame can go to the GOP House leadership that didn’t even let it out of committee until May 17, then waited six days to put it to a floor vote that received better than a supermajority. (Isn’t it remarkable how Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, not long after he announced for statewide office, began moving bills, making rulings conducive to that, and started backing strongly efforts to not bust the state’s spending cap?) Even as the Senate Judiciary B approved it a week later, with just nine days to session end it’s actually behind the pace of last year’s bill that got stonewalled.

This comes as no surprise. Although the GOP has a supermajority plus one in the Senate, a handful of its members go weak in the knees on different issues that should be slam dunks for any conservative (or, in the case of the child protection bill HB 648 that would prohibit permanent physiological mutilation of minors without informed and reasoned consent, any human being). McCormick’s HB 131 presents one such challenge when the chattering classes and certain special interests to which they pay attention oppose it, yet in all likelihood a majority of their constituents, and almost certainly of those who vote in legislative elections, favor it.

So, the strategy becomes trying to kill a measure without going on the record whether it’s favored, as a means of escaping accountability, just as in the case of HB 648. Expect this to play out with another Senate committee referral as HB 131 has a fiscal note of sufficient size to send it to Revenue and Fiscal Affairs which doesn’t have it on its agenda, then entails a vote to get it on the floor, then almost guaranteed another with a supermajority to consider it past the 57^th calendar of the session (and in the House), then a vote for passage and (avoided only if in the process it reverts back to the form it left the House) if that succeeds a conference with approval needed there by negotiators from both chambers and majority votes in both as well.

You get the picture how it can be slow-walked into submission. And this despite the fact that in the aggregate research shows, at worst, right-to-carry (the legal framework of all including Louisiana but seven states, meaning with or without permits) has little to no adverse effect on crime or gun deaths and, at best, deters these. In other words, balancing the (rough) estimated impacts on desired public policy such as crime reduction and fewer gun deaths with the goal of robust exercise of constitutional rights, there’s no real reason to oppose constitutional carry and every reason to join (as of the moment of writing) 27 states that have embraced it, including every state except Louisiana between Georgia/Florida and Texas/Oklahoma.

Yet Republican Senate leadership threatens not to join the club despite a majority in it wanting to do so, in order to allow a very few of that contingent to avoid an uncomfortable vote. Gentlemen’s agreements of this nature, while consistent with a get-along-go-along philosophy of circling the wagons to protect all from having to make such votes, run counter to accountability to constituents. Only leadership more interested in promulgating a superior, popular agenda rather than catering to the feelings of its followers will rid either chamber of this tendency holding back Louisiana.