Missouri Republicans Vote to Affirm Toddlers’ Rights to Carry Firearms in the Streets

In the year 2023, no one expects Republicans to have a reasonable take on gun violence (like that it’s a problem), or to do something about it (like pass meaningful gun control legislation). Still, you might think that conservatives wouldn’t be so thoroughly detached from reality that they would approve of—nay, fight for the rights of—small children being able to openly carry firearms in public places. Because that would just be, to use an official legislative term, f–king insane. Can you guess where we’re going with this?

In a turn of events that absolutely defies logic, the Republican-controlled Missouri House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to reject an amendment that would have banned minors from being allowed to openly carry guns on public land without adult supervision. Which, thanks to a 2017 law, they are currently free to do. (That law, which was vetoed by then governor Jay Nixon and overridden by the Missouri House, also allows Missouri residents to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, safety training, or criminal-background check. As Sgt. Charles Wall, spokesman for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “under current state law, there is no minimum age to lawfully possess a firearm.”) To be clear: The proposal rejected this week was not seeking to ban minors from openly carrying weapons on public land, period, but simply from doing so without an adult supervising them. But apparently even that was too much for the state’s conservatives, who quite literally believe it’s fine for actual kids to walk down the street carrying guns. The proposal was defeated by 104-39, with just a single Republican voting in favor of the ban.

State representative Donna Baringer, a Democrat who represents St. Louis, said she decided to sponsor the amendment after police in her district asked for stronger regulations to stop “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s.” With the proposal officially blocked, said 14-year-olds, and kids half their age and younger, “have been emboldened [to carry AR-15s], and they are walking around with them,” she said. Representative Lane Roberts, apparently the only Republican with any sense in the Missouri House of Representatives, had said prior to the vote: “This is about people who don’t have the life experience to make a decision about the consequences of having that gun in their possession. Why is an 8-year-old carrying a sidearm in the street?”

A great question! And one that his fellow GOP lawmakers obviously did not have any good answers for because if you’re a sane person, there is none. In a ridiculous attempt to justify that scenario, Republican state representative Bill Hardwick argued that he “just [has] a different approach for addressing public safety that doesn’t deprive people, who have done nothing to any other person, who will commit no violence, from their freedom.” As a reminder the people Hardwick is arguing must have the freedom to carry firearms on their person, are children, some of whom cannot even buy a ticket for a PG-13 movie.

In a bit of equally absurd “logic,” state representative Tony Lovasco told The Washington Post: “Government should prohibit acts that directly cause measurable harm to others, not activities we simply suspect might escalate. Few would support banning unaccompanied kids in public places, yet one could argue such a bad policy might be effective.” Right, yes, except one small thing: A kid hanging out in public without an adult is a much smaller risk to themself and others than a kid hanging out in public without an adult and carrying a gun. Someone—not us of course, definitely not us, but someone—might suggest this is the argument of a total moron.

Of course, all of this is happening less than a month after news of a Virginia six-year-old shooting their teacher and a viral surveillance video from Indiana that captured a diaper-wearing toddler carrying a handgun and firing it.

Meanwhile, as state representative Peter Merideth noted, conservative lawmakers in the state who think kids bearing arms is fine and dandy, are currently trying to pass a bill that would make drag performances on public property or seen by minors class A misdemeanors. “Kids carrying guns on the street or in a park is a matter of individual freedom and personal responsibility. Kids seeing a drag queen read a children’s book or sing a song is a danger the government must ban,” Merideth tweeted. “Do I have that right MO GOP?”