Showdown in the Show-Me State:

The Fight Over Conceal-and-Carry Gun Laws In Missouri

Price: $34.95

SHOWDOWN IN THE SHOW-ME STATE

William T. Horner

University of Missouri Press Columbia Mo 2005

$34.95

Review by K. L. Jamison

It is startling to open a book at random and find oneself quoted. While the quotes are accurate, the book is an incomplete history of the License To Carry (LTC) struggle in Missouri.

The author is a political science professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia. The book was written less than ten miles from a major player in the License To Carry campaign, and thirty miles from the political figures in the state capital, yet the author never conducted a single interview. He relies on newspaper accounts for his history. Several times he mentions that the state newspapers opposed LTC; most people would worry about the effect of this bias on coverage. The author does not appear to have had any such concern.

The problem with this approach is illustrated by his treatment of the supposed “death threat” against anti-LTC Senator Jet Banks in 1995. Late in the 1995 session an LTC bill was poised to pass the legislature and land on the governor’s desk. The back-story known to participants in the struggle, and thus not to the author, is that the governor desperately did not want the bill on his desk. Senator Jet Banks dutifully rose in the Senate to claim that an advocate of the bill had threatened to kill him. The Senate closed ranks and killed the bill. The author quotes the newspaper accounts and treats the incident as if it really occurred even stating that Senator Caskey, the sponsor of the bill seemed to believe Senator Banks. Had the author spoken to Senator Caskey, or anyone present for the Senator’s remarks, he would have known of the extreme sarcasm used to refer to the “honorable” Senator Banks. Had he spoken to anyone involved he would have learned that when reporters told Senator Banks that LTC leader Tim Oliver had called him a liar, the “honorable” senator reportedly dashed through the corridors of the capital shouting “I’ll kill him”, an incident not reported in the newspapers. After the session ended, senator Banks told newspapers that the LTC advocate he had accused had said that he could no longer support senator Banks. The senator claimed that since there was no other candidate in his district, this lack of support was a death threat. The author does not mention this absurd rationalization.

The author describes gun rights as an urban-rural wedge issue in Missouri; one manufactured by the NRA. He claims that Missouri grassroots organizations were formed and financed by the NRA, and that there was no significant local support for LTC which comes as a surprise to the NRA and Missouri grassroots organizations. He details the NRA friend of the court brief filed for the lawsuit on the constitutionality of LTC, but does not mention the Missouri intervener in the suit or the money raised for the intervener by the Missouri Legal Defense Fund, or the financial hit taken by opponents of LTC due to the efforts of the Legal Defense Fund.

The work is a perfunctory history of the LTC effort in Missouri. It does not have the depth of history or analysis the subject demands. The book reminds participants of all the work done on LTC, all the people who have been involved, and that we have not truly won until we write the history.