‘Never again, again.’ Kansas City rallies for gun safety laws in Missouri and Kansas

Meredith Payments and her buddy, Joni Corridor, discovered it laborious to imagine that that they had to make use of the identical outdated indicators once more on Saturday to assist a crowd name for gun security legal guidelines in response to yet one more wave of mass shootings.

Payments and Corridor had been marching buddies on the March For Our Lives rally in 2018, which was organized after the college taking pictures in Parkville, Florida. This time, Payments and Corridor had been utilizing their outdated indicators they made for the rally created in response to the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.

“We’re doing ‘By no means once more,’ once more,” Payments mentioned. “We’re heartbroken people, is what we’re, and we’re sick of performing like there’s nothing we will do.”

About 100 individuals gathered below shade bushes in Gillham Park on a day the place temperatures reached into the 90s. They held indicators studying, “Sufficient is sufficient,” or “Shield youngsters not weapons.” Saturday’s March For Our Lives rally in Kansas Metropolis was certainly one of a whole lot nationwide, the biggest held in Washington D.C.

Corridor, a Missouri resident, mentioned she was ashamed by the state’s gun legal guidelines.

“We’re defending the weapons, not the individuals,” mentioned Corridor. “I need strict background checks, and ready intervals, and there’s no cause why a citizen ought to personal a semi-automatic weapon, interval. No cause.”

Missouri has among the weakest gun legal guidelines within the nation. In a 2021 gun regulation scorecard, the Giffords Regulation Middle to Stop Gun Violence, ranked Missouri forty seventh within the nation for the energy of its gun legal guidelines. Final summer season, Gov. Mike Parson signed the Second Modification Safety Act, or SAPA, into regulation. The measure bars police from imposing federal gun legal guidelines and permits non-public residents to sue native or state officers for as much as $50,000 in the event that they imagine their Second Modification rights have been violated.

In February of this 12 months, the U.S. Division of Justice sued Missouri, saying SAPA is unconstitutional and inflicting ‘important hurt’ to regulation enforcement and public security. In a separate lawsuit filed in Cole County, Jackson County, St. Louis County, and the town of St. Louis, officers are attempting to dam the regulation. In August 2021, Cole County Circuit Decide Daniel Inexperienced declined to dam the regulation, so challengers appealed to the Missouri Supreme Courtroom. In April, the Missouri Supreme Courtroom dominated that St. Louis and Jackson County can argue whether or not or not SAPA is authorized, however they’ve to take action in entrance of a Cole County choose first.

Amy Axtell, a volunteer with Mothers Demand Motion, mentioned she is anxious that if SAPA will not be struck down, Missouri residents, particularly home violence survivors, are in peril.

“What SAPA does is mainly permits home abusers to maintain their weapons,” Axtell mentioned, including that the regulation that covers weapons and home violence is a federal statute.

“If federal regulation cannot be enforced, then we’re presupposed to go to state regulation and Missouri would not have that state regulation,” she mentioned.

Axtell joined others Saturday in calling for a ban on assault weapons, common background checks, and purple flag legal guidelines in Missouri.

“We’d like a lot right here in Missouri. It might assist if we simply had some widespread sense gun legal guidelines, some actually fundamental stuff,” she mentioned. “If we had a regulation for secure storage, it will assist lower suicide. It might assist preserve weapons out of the arms of curious youngsters.”

Kansas Metropolis Mayor Quinton Lucas criticized lax gun legal guidelines in Missouri and Kansas and advised individuals to name U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri and U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran to demand they do one thing. Lucas mentioned gun legal guidelines in Missouri have regressed because the early 2000s.

“What they [Missouri lawmakers] have completed as a substitute is to say, not solely will we have now no allowing, no necessities, no guidelines, not solely will we tie the arms of our law enforcement officials behind their backs, however greater than something, I really feel like in Missouri nowadays, in the event you cross the state line, they are saying, ‘Welcome. This is an AR-15. Good luck.’”

“The explanation we have now so many gun homicides in our metropolis, gun shootings in our metropolis and gun massacres in our nation is as a result of it is too straightforward to get too many weapons in our nation,” Lucas mentioned.