Vox Magazine

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MISSOURI UNDER THE GUN

How the fight to bear arms is shaping the state as the nation watches Page 4

IN THIS ISSUE

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APRIL 27, 2017 VOLUME 19 ISSUE 15 | PUBLISHED BY THE COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

GUNS IN MISSOURI Missourians now need no training to carry a concealed weapon. With a new "stand your ground" law in place and a campus concealed carry bill gaining momentum in the Missouri General Assembly, guns are more prevalent in the state than ever before. PAGE 4 LOCAL CASE A shooting over a cell phone leads to criminal charges and prompts a debate about "stand your ground." PAGE 6 BLACK AND WHITE Gun violence is a tragic daily reality in North St. Louis. Meet the people trying to save their communities. PAGE 8 KIDS IN THE ER St. Louis doctors approach guns not as a legislative issue but a public health issue as more children are affected by gun violence. PAGE 13

DIVE INTO PAULA HAWKINS' NEW MYSTERY The author of The Girl on the Train returns with her second novel, Into the Water, a mystery about women who keep turning up dead in a river.

STYLIN' IN YOUR STAN SMITHS Adidas' plain white sneakers are trending. They can be worn with anything, they're super cute and they've been spotted all around CoMo — ­­ but will the shoes survive the changing styles?

REWARDS FOR CAFFEINE ADDICTS Now that Dunkin' Donuts is right around the corner from Starbucks, we explore whose points program gets you free coffee the fastest.

UP IN ARMS A State Troopers' class teaches when shooting makes sense and, in the process, affects legislation. PAGE 16 FIGHTING WORDS Volunteers with Moms Demand Action travel from around the state to advocate for common sense gun laws. PAGE 18

EDITOR’S LETTER

CONCEALED CARRY ON CAMPUS In 2004, Utah became the first state to allow concealed carry on college campuses. Missouri could be the 10th. PAGE 20

MUSIC They met at a pizza parlor in Mexico, Missouri.

Now acoustic duo and BFFs Blue jay brings its sound to Rose Music Hall. PAGE 3 THE SCENE Explore the work of two designers showcased at the Stephens College Fashion Show. PAGE 22 Corrections: A story in the April 20 issue mischaracterized Roam Sticks, which are made of pork. A separate story in the same issue misidentified colors used by Joel Sager, which are cerulean blue and yellow ochre.

COVER DESIGN: MADALYNE BIRD COVER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: MADALYNE BIRD AND WIKIMEDIA COMMONS FEATURE DESIGN: ELIZABETH SAWEY

CHRISTINE JACKSON EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

320 LEE HILLS HALL COLUMBIA MO 65211 EDITORIAL: 573-884-6432 vox@missouri.edu ADVERTISING: 573-882-5714 CIRCULATION: 573-882-5700 TO SUBMIT A CALENDAR EVENT: email vox@missouri.edu or submit via online form at voxmagazine.com TO RECEIVE VOX IN YOUR INBOX: sign up for email newsletter at voxmagazine.com

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I grew up in a suburb just west of St. Louis, and I spent a lot of time watching the local TV news. As far back as I can remember, those newscasts included almost daily reports of shootings and killings.

That fact isn’t so surprising when you know that St. Louis has the highest homicide rate in the nation. The city saw 188 homicides in 2016 and has already seen another 49 this year.

Our state has a long history with guns and gun laws. That’s part of the reason you’ll find this week’s feature (Page 4) to be a bit longer than usual. We’ve loaded 18 pages of this 24-page issue with stories and information about the place The New York Times Editorial Board so lovingly dubbed “The Shoot-Me State” in a September 2016 op-ed.

There are a lot of contentious topics thrown around when people discuss guns — state oversight, safety, Second Amendment rights, public health — but they often lead directly to arguments. My advice for you this week is to sit, read and think. You’ll find people with differing opinions and experiences between these pages. They’re doctors and legislators and pastors and teachers and mothers. They have different opinions of what the problem is when it comes to guns in Missouri, but they’re all working to solve it. See what they have to say and, perhaps more importantly, why they say it.

I don’t know if you’ll change your mind about anything. I don’t know that I did. But I do know I learned more than I ever knew about Missouri and its guns from the eight writers who spent months reporting these stories. We can only hope you have a similar experience.

VOX STAFF Editor: Christine Jackson Deputy Editor: Dan Roe Managing Editor: Madison Fleck Creative Director: Madalyne Bird Digital Managing Editor: Abby Holman Art Directors: Mary Hilleren, Elizabeth Sawey Photo Editor: Annaliese Nurnberg Online Editor: Lea Konczal Multimedia Editor: Mitchel Summers News & Insight Editors: Madelyne Maag, Elaina Steingard, Jing Yang The Scene Editors: Lauren Kelliher, Alyssa Salela, Danielle Zoellner Music Editors: John Heniff, Taylor Ysteboe Arts & Books Editors: Claudia Guthrie, Renee Molner, Zachary Van Epps Contributing Writers: Corin Cesaric, Gerard Edic, Emily Hannemann, Max Havey, Lis Joyce, Meghan Lally, Rick Morgan, Rachel Phillips, Jessica Rendall, Karlee Renkoski, Tyler Schneider, Kelsie Schrader, Erika Stark, Samantha Stokes, Catherine Wheeler Editorial Director: Heather Lamb Executive Editor: Jennifer Rowe Digital Director: Sara Shipley Hiles Writing Coach: Berkley Hudson Office Manager: Kim Townlain

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PHOTOS BY OR COURTESY OF ALISA CONNAN, JOHN MONE/AP

MUSIC

Birds of a feather

Best friends Bradley Hutchinson and Josh Deal find harmony in Blue jay

BY BROOKS HOLTON A lit Christmas tree at their backs, Bradley Hutchinson and Josh Deal bob to the rhythm of “Where I Want to Be.” It’s Dec. 27, 2016, and the folk-pop duo known as Blue jay passionately belts out for an unrequited love. Deal sings lead and plays banjo, while Hutchinson sings backup and plays guitar. Their vocal harmonies and twangy instrumentals create an infectious track that resonates with anyone trying to win over a crush.

Just over three months later, the best friends from Mexico, Missouri, seem to have reached perfect harmony in their music careers: “Where I Want to Be” was released as a single on April 17, and Blue jay will play its first headliner show tonight at Rose Music Hall.

Blue jay formed in October 2016 and is named after The Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way.” Although the band is a relatively new project for Hutchinson and Deal, the duo’s roots can be traced to slinging pizza and playing gigs at Coach’s Pizza

World in Mexico. Over the course of four years working together, Deal taught Hutchinson how to play guitar and write songs and later asked him to play bass in his folk band, The Havana Honeys.

After The Havana Honeys ended its three-year run in July 2015, Hutchinson and Deal remained co-workers while going their separate ways musically.

But when Deal heard “You,” a song Hutchinson wrote that didn’t fit in the previous band, he knew it was time they made music together again.

“We just started jamming, and I was like, ‘You know, this could really turn into something,’” Deal says. “We can sit down and be creative together, and there’s not so much judgment. We just get along really well, so it works and flows better than anything I’ve ever done musically.”

The songwriting shoots for simple but emotionally dense and honest lyrics.

“If we can write something catchy so that people listen to it and then in turn, we’re also spreading a message that needs to be out there, we’re nailing it,” Hutchinson says. “I still consider it pop music because it leaves an imprint on you. Those deep songs only mean something to a person if they hear it.”

Those deep songs include “North Carolina,” written by Deal about his father dying when he was a teenager.

Deal says Kevin Gates, a producer out of

Bradley Hutchinson and Josh Deal selected the band name Blue jay in reference to the song “Blue Jay Way” by The Beatles, one of the duo’s biggest influences.

Springfield, was holding back tears when he heard the song.

“It wasn’t just ‘North Carolina’ that elicited an emotional response,” says Gates, who has worked with the likes of Never Shout Never and is producing Blue jay’s upcoming debut album. “I was impressed by the level of polish and sheer musicianship standing before me while we were in pre-production. That level of raw

talent is becoming a very rare thing. I felt particularly grateful to know that I was going to be part of capturing something truly special.”

BLUE JAY Rose Music Hall April 27, 9 p.m., $5 874-1944, rosemusichall.com

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MUSIC DINING NEWS MOVIES EVENTS Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman DINING NEWS MOVIES EVENTS MUSIC 8-9am and Noon-1pm NEWS MOVIES EVENTS MUSIC DINING Blue Jay pose for portraits for Vox in the Lee Hills studio on Thursday, April 13, 2017.

The Diane Rehm Show 9-11am

Fresh Air with Terry Gross 11am-Noon

Free Every Thursday PHOTO BY MONIQUE WOO

On your radio dial at 89.5 fm or live streaming at kopn.org 04.27.17

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STARING DOWN THE

BARREL Missouri is at the forefront of a national move to make it easier to buy, carry, conceal and shoot guns.

Is the state protecting its citizens or killing them?

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W

elcome to Missouri, where most 19-year-olds can now legally carry a concealed weapon without a permit.

Here, you no longer have to retreat before shooting someone outside your home if you feel your life is in danger. You can buy a handgun from a private seller without having your criminal background or mental health history checked. The state Capitol allows concealed weapons in most places, and might allow them on college campuses and churches (see “Higher (Caliber) Education,” page 20).

Since 2004, when Missouri ended its ban on concealed carry after 128 years, the state has been rapidly relaxing its gun laws. A law known as the “castle doctrine” removed the duty to retreat in self-defense situations on private property. The concealed carry age was lowered from 21 to 19 (and to 18 for those in the Army). Certified school employees can carry guns on campus. Open carry is allowed for anyone with a concealed carry weapons permit. Missouri once required eight hours of training for gun owners, but now public-school first-graders receive more mandatory instruction by watching a video (see “The Wolf at the Door,” page 16).

In January, the Missouri legislature added two more expansive provisions to the list: “permitless carry,” which guarantees the ability to bear a concealed weapon without training or permit, and “stand your ground,” a self-defense law that expanded the “castle doctrine” to public places. Those changes have led to confusion. Days after the new law took hold, a young Columbia gun owner shot someone because of a dispute over an iPhone. He erroneously believed it was legal to shoot another in order to defend a piece of property (see “Warning Shots,” page 6). The Columbia Public Library changed their signage regarding concealed weapons after a state representative who brought her gun inside threatened to sue the library for banning firearms. “‘Stand your ground’ laws have been widely condemned for facilitating violent encounters and, in court, for unequal application,” reported The Trace, a publication that documents American gun laws.

It was under Florida’s “stand your ground” law that neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, in 2012. The incident provoked national outrage and expanded public awareness of the laws. States have been reluctant to enact such laws since 2012, but Missouri’s law passed with ease, overriding then-Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto with a three-fourths majority, though only two-thirds was required. Not everyone is on board.

Members of advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America have been vocal about the changes. They attend legislative sessions to voice opposition to expanding gun laws, including a recent attempt to abolish gun-free zones (see “Fight Like a Mom,” page 18).

In St. Louis, which has the country’s highest homicide rate, doctors worry that the new laws will only exacerbate gun violence.

They endure the stress of treating babies and others who suffer lifelong injuries or ultimately die because of it. They want to address the problem as a public health issue and discuss gun safety with their patients, but they feel the problem has become too political (see “Caught Between the Capitol and the Emergency Room,” page 13).

Community leaders who work to address gun violence in urban, predominantly black neighborhoods feel especially disconnected from the rural and suburban white Stories by Brad Bergner, legislators who proposed and passed the laws. They’re Cameron Evans, concerned easier access to guns will make the problem Renee Hickman, worse (see “More Laws, Less Order,” page 8).

Erin McKinstry, Meanwhile, no other state saw a larger per capita Blake Nelson, Michael increase in gun homicide rates from 2008 to 2014 than Nowicki, Aaron Reiss Missouri, according to a Johns Hopkins study. The and Dan Roe study’s lead researcher, Daniel Webster, says, “Missouri Photo by policy makers have a created an environment where Davis Winborne you’ve reduced accountability … removing other sort of constraints on behavior (that) encourages the use of lethal force in situations where it’s really not necessary.”

So how did Missouri get here, and what does all this mean for the average Missourian? For the future? Eight Vox reporters went on a search to find out.

— ERIN MCKINSTRY

WARNING

SHOTS

A cell phone deal gone wrong ended with one man shot, one man awaiting trial, and the first attempt to use the “stand your ground” defense in Missouri by

CAMERON EVANS

K

arl Otto Henson couldn’t wait to get his hands on the new iPhone 7 Plus when it was released in September 2016.

The demand for the phone was so high that it sold out immediately. Eager to get the latest model, he came up with a reasonable plan: buy an iPhone 7 to use, then sell it once the Plus he’d preordered was in stock. For Henson, what started as a simple desire to sell his phone escalated into shots fired and an arrest — and the state’s first case in which a gun owner attempted to defend himself with the new “stand your ground” law.

The 23-year-old’s iPhone 7 was listed on Facebook for about a month when 20-year-old Devonte Robinson messaged him about buying it. The two agreed to meet at Henson’s apartment at Grindstone Canyon, an off-campus student-oriented housing complex, but Henson postponed the deal when he was unable to clear his data from the phone.

They rescheduled the meeting for Jan. 23 and met in the front yard of a white two-story duplex in a cul-de-sac on Riva Ridge Court in north Columbia. When Henson first handed Robinson the phone, he says Robinson commented that he needed to get his SIM card and walked behind the duplex. After he returned and examined the phone again, he took off running with it behind the duplex, Henson says. Henson had a gun. He took it out, chased Robinson and shot at him — seven times. Henson watched him fall to the ground as he ran through a field before getting up and taking off again. At the time, he was unsure if he hit Robinson.

When officers arrived at 5:25 p.m. in response to a call about gunshots, they found Henson’s handgun in the back of his car. (No one would comment on the type of handgun). They searched for Robinson but were unable to find him until they were told that a man with a gunshot wound to his left heel had checked into University Hospital.

“The only reason I thought it was OK to shoot at him while he was running away was because of what happened with the new year with the gun law change,” Henson told Officer Spirit Stevens, according to the probable cause statement, the

MISSOURI’S HISTORY WITH GUNS by

BRAD BERGNER and MICHAEL NOWICKI

Missouri’s “stand your ground” law didn’t come out of nowhere.

Roots of the legislation predate statehood and pass through frontier days, slavery, the “Mormon Wars,” post-Civil War vigilantism and now the Capitol, where legislators are enacting increasingly permissive laws regarding guns, public spaces and deadly force. To understand the current landscape, consider these key moments in the state’s firearms history.

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fact-based written account of the evidence and circumstances provided by law enforcement. “Something along the lines of ‘the old law, you weren’t allowed to shoot somebody when their back is turned to you,’” Henson says. He was detained and charged with armed criminal action and first-degree assault. There’s no record that Robinson was charged.

The shooting happened 23 days after Missouri implemented SB 656, which contained a new law, commonly known as “stand your ground.” It allows a person to shoot if they feel their life or someone else’s life is threatened and they have no alternative. A person cannot, however, use force to protect property.

The law was met with controversy, confusion and lots of opinions. Supporters say it gives citizens more power to defend themselves. Opponents worry that it creates a dangerous “shoot first” mentality.

“The default is: Consider everybody armed,” says Caroline Light, author of a new book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. “It escalates confrontations that could have been solved by reason.”

In reference to Henson, Tim Oliver, a concealed carry class instructor in Columbia, says “This guy is the perfect example of somebody who just had no business carrying a gun without knowing the law.” Oliver teaches his students not only how to shoot a gun but also when to shoot.

A former conceal-carry instructor named Mike Stassi stopped teaching after Missouri, in 2014, lowered the legal age for obtaining a concealed-carry permit from 21 to 19. Of SB 656, he says, “It’s got to be one of the dumbest things that the Missouri legislature ever did,” he says. “You have people buying a gun and not knowing what the law is. It’s like buying an automobile and not knowing how to drive.”

KNOWING THE LAW

On the evening of March 7, handouts and business cards sat as placeholders on tables in a conference room at the Best Western Plus in St. Charles. A few people flipped through the handouts as new arrivals signed in near the door. All had something in common: an interest in knowing their gun rights. “I’m putting on a seminar simply because I’ve gotten a lot of calls from clients since the laws have changed,” says the instructor, Wayne Schoeneberg, a criminal defense attorney, as the seminar begins.

Now that the state no longer requires firearms training in order to own a gun, education is up to the individual. Training reduces the risk of making a serious mistake, Schoeneberg tells the 20 or so men and women in the class. They are mostly white and middle-aged. “If force is ever used, the fact that you had the training will be to your benefit when law enforcement assesses your situation,” Schoeneberg says.

A trained gun owner is more likely to understand the ever-changing laws.

For years, Missouri operated with the “castle doctrine,” which allowed a person to shoot an intruder while inside his or her own home if there was a perceived threat to his or her life. The law required a shooter to “retreat” before firing. The new “stand your ground” law, which went into effect Jan. 1, removed the retreat requirement and allowed for such shootings in public places, not just the home. “I worry about the “castle doctrine” and the “stand your ground” doctrine because I think that people think this is a license to do more than they’re really allowed,” Schoeneberg tells the audience.

Schoeneberg previously defended a former sheriff’s deputy in a “castle doctrine” case. He was found not guilty. The deputy’s wife had gone out to the couple’s garage one morning to go to church when she found a drunken man in her

1803 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE Under President Thomas Jefferson the U.S. assumes control of 827,000 square miles of untamed territory west of the Mississippi River. The $15 million transaction includes all or part of 15 eventual states, including the frontier now known as Missouri. By 2017 the state’s most prominent city, St. Louis — the “Gateway to the West” — will have the highest homicide rate in the nation.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

car. She ran back inside and told her husband that she was scared. In response, he grabbed his handgun, called 911 with his name and location and said, “You better get somebody out here before I shoot this bastard.” He shot the bastard.

A blond woman in a purple shirt who was sitting toward the back of the room raised her hand. “I had a girlfriend who lived out here in one of the random, isolated subdivisions, and she came home and she found a dude taking a shower in her shower,” she says. “If she had ran and got her gun and shot at him, would that have been, you know? ’Cause she feared for her life.”

Schoeneberg says that for the “castle doctrine” to apply, the man needed to have entered and remained unlawfully.

“The question becomes, then, is it reasonable to shoot a naked man in your shower?” Several people laughed.

At the end of the seminar, Julianne Leimkiller, an instructor at Stellar Concealed Carry, thanked Schoeneberg for reaffirming that gun owners are “still responsible for knowing the law.” She told him, “Unless you’re trained or unless you take the time to read the law yourself and understand it, how are you going to be able to quote it if you’re standing there with a smoking gun?”

THE WAITING GAME

This is the first version of Senate Bill No. 656. It was passed in 2014 and granted open carry privileges to anyone with a concealed carry weapons permit. In 2016, a new SB 656 allowed Missouri gun owners to conceal and carry their firearms without permits and use them for self defense outside the home.

After spending about a month in the Boone County Jail, Henson was released on home detention. He now lives at his parents’ home in House Springs, Missouri, while he is awaiting trial.

Before the incident, Henson was a junior studying fisheries and wildlife at MU and working at MC Sports, a chain sporting goods store. Now, he faces felony charges.

He used to go to a recreational shooting range in Columbia every week, but lately he says he tries not to think about guns because as a condition of his bond, he can’t be around them.

If convicted of a felony, he may never own one again.

Although Henson says he thinks he is going to win his case because he has “the best lawyers in the Midwest,”— his attorneys are Nicholas Williams and Thomas Dudash, both based in St. Louis — he worries he will lose his rights to own a gun and vote if convicted. “I mean, this is going to take a lot of my basic American rights away for defending myself, if you ask me,” he says.

Henson had heard that prosecutors wanted Robinson to testify against him. Vox reached out to Robinson to discuss the incident and upcoming court case but despite repeated efforts, was unable to reach him for comment.

The next hearing is scheduled for May 11. Apart from court visits, Henson says he has no intention of returning to Columbia. When asked how Vox reporters could reach him to conduct a follow-up interview, he offered his email. He’d just gotten a new phone, and he couldn’t remember the number.

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THE MISSOURI TERRITORY

FIRST WEAPONS LAWS

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

The Louisiana Territory is dubbed the Missouri Territory in order to avoid confusion with the new state of Louisiana. The first assembly of the territory meets, and organizes the first five counties.

By now slaves account for at least 14.5 percent of the population.

PHOTO COURTESY OF LEGISCAN

The legislature enacts a law barring slaves from carrying or possessing guns, ammunitions, clubs or other weapons. The statute grants whites the right to seize weapons found in slave possession.

This is among the earliest firearm legislation in Missouri history, forever tying its gun laws to the institution of slavery.

Representatives push for statehood but U.S. officials are reluctant to grant it, fearing that Missouri’s admission to the Union as a slave state will upset the balance of power between free and slave states. To address this concern, Congress passes the Missouri Compromise, which admits Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. But the controversy is far from settled.

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MORE LAWS, LESS ORDER The tragedy of gun homicide falls on Missouri’s poorest residents. Recent rollbacks in state gun laws may be making the problem worse. by

ERIN MCKINSTRY DAVIS WINBORNE

photos by

I

grew up in a small town called De Soto about an hour south of St. Louis. The place was quiet. We left our keys in the mailbox. Most of the kids I went to school with were white, and the median annual income was around $30,000.

At least once a month, we’d drive to St. Louis to go shopping or eat out. But there were parts of the city that we never went to, that I only heard about on the news when I saw another young black face flash across the screen — almost an afterthought.

Another young man who’d lost his life to guns, to crime, to poverty.

Pastor B.T. Rice of New I didn’t know that Horizon Seventh Day when I was driving the Christian Church in St. highway to Lambert-St. Louis founded St. Louis Louis International Airport, Initiative to Reduce I was driving over burnt Violence . He started it mansions with missing after having to “bury too roofs and lots littered with many young people” in trash. I’d learn later about his duties as a pastor. the legacy of white flight, abandonment and poverty that has led to concentrations of crime and, more specifically, gun homicide.

Most don’t remember Jamyla Bolden, the 9-year-old girl who was doing her homework when she was shot on her mother’s bed in Ferguson in 2015. Nor do most remember the 21-year-old Courtney Williams, who was shot and killed a year earlier while he was driving down Kensington Avenue in North St. Louis on Christmas Eve. Missouri’s legislature has made it easier to acquire, carry and use guns over the past decade, passing “stand your ground” and “permitless carry” provisions that went into effect in January. The representatives who voted for the recent changes represent districts that are on average 93 percent white and 43 percent rural, not the urban areas where most people are killed with guns.

In the past few months, St. Louis representatives introduced bills to combat the changes. One bill required the reporting of a lost or stolen Pastor B.T. Rice drives by the firearm; another Ferguson Market and Liquor, authorized a tax the store Michael Brown deduction for the was accused of robbing cost of gun safety and before being fatally shot training courses. The by police in 2014. Rice’s state legislature hasn’t initiative focuses on the passed those bills. neighborhoods of 6th District and Jennings, which border In the meantime, Ferguson. the burden remains 8

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When Bob Lee held a grand opening for his hair product shop on West Florissant Avenue, no customers had shown up by late afternoon.

Even a new business like Lee’s isn’t getting traction in the Jennings area.

heavy on the state’s poorest and most disadvantaged communities. But more St. Louis area residents are fighting to make that invisible problem visible.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD APPROACH

When I visited James Clark, he told me we come from two different worlds.

Clark grew up in North St. Louis and returned in the late ’80s after serving in the Army. A framed picture of Clark in uniform hangs on the wall in his office. He speaks in practiced, mobilizing phrases.

“I believe in maps,” Clark says as he unrolls one and slams his desk with his hand for emphasis. “Give me a map, and let’s go take some territory.” But Clark’s not talking about going to war, he’s talking about addressing gun violence in his community: “We’ve got to get surgical. We’ve got to look at the neighborhoods where crime and violence are more prevalent, and we’ve got to have a boots-on-the-ground approach, door-to-door, direct neighborhood engagement.”

Clark works as the vice president of community outreach at Better Family Life, a community nonprofit on Page Boulevard in North St. Louis. In 2005, the organization bought and renovated what used to be Emerson Elementary School, which closed because of population decline in the neighborhood. The 60,000-square-foot stone building and its manicured lawn provide one of the few reminders of a once-thriving community.

Page Boulevard saw 15 homicides from 2008 to 2016, according to data from the St. Louis Metropolitan Bob Lee’s shop Police Department. That’s specializes in nearly two people killed weaves and wigs, per year on a single 4-mile but it also sells stretch of road. Several of clothing and other the old, brick buildings products. on Page have boarded-up windows, and it’s hard to find a grocery store or a restaurant nearby.

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says. “Slavery was foremost a system of labor but it was also a system of control … They could only travel with a written pass and by law were not allowed to gather without a white man present.”

Slaves now account for nearly 20 percent of Missouri’s population. Fearing Soon after, the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith (pictured revolt, some white Missourians attempt to thwart insurrection. “In most parts of the South, including Missouri, there was a slave patrol in most counties,” says Diane left), unveils the setting for Christ’s second coming as Jackson County, Missouri, just east of Kansas City. Mormons flock there, Mutti-Burke, associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “All white men were expected to ride on it at some point during the month.” mostly from Northern states. Locals dislike the newcomers because Wealthy white men often paid poorer white men to take their places. “They rode many oppose slavery. Missourians, fearing for their way of life, eventually begin attacking the Mormons. out at night looking for people out of place or unsanctioned gatherings,” she

SLAVES AND MORMONS

PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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“The life’s trajectory of a young boy or a young girl should not be established at birth based on the neighborhood that they were born into,” Clark says.

“We have volumes and volumes of publications in St. Louis that point to the same side of town, that point to the same zip codes and that point to the same blocks.”

After more than 25 years of attempts to persuade the city to adopt his approach to gun violence, Clark decided to take action. He says he felt like people weren’t talking about gun violence the way they should be, not within his community or outside of it. So, in 2015, he started making signs. On them, the St. Louis Arch stretches across the white cardboard background, the gateway for a message in black lettering: “We must stop killing each other.” The signs ended up in the yards of more than 14,000 homes in North St. Louis.

Then, Better Family Life opened a de-escalation phone line in December 2016, and, suddenly, people started calling. They knew someone who might get shot or who might shoot someone, but they didn’t know where to turn for help. They didn’t trust the police, and when they did, they saw no results.

Better Family Life was contacted by a Pizza Hut employee who was afraid the brother of her Leon Hite is the security director for the Jennings manager and another Educational Training co-worker were going School. The school, known to shoot each other. locally as JETS, provides The organization also education for adolescents learned about a man who drop out of high who was ready to shoot school after being involved someone at a bus stop for in criminal activity. disrespecting his wife.

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These aren’t your typical stories of gang involvement or drug disputes. They’re conflicts among people that escalated because of factors like toxic stress and poverty. Before, the people who knew about the conflicts had no one to tell. But now, they have Clark.

He and his outreach specialists approach every situation differently. They might call the mother of the potential shooter or go visit the potential victim at home. Clark opened a dedicated phone line and started getting as many as 10 calls a day. “When this phone rings, whatever I’m doing stops,” he says. He also opened Tuesday evening de-escalation centers in four churches where people could talk to trained counselors about potential gun violence. By the end of the last year, 15 conflicts involving gun violence were resolved.

This program is a fresh perspective on how Clark thinks the community members will solve gun homicide. Clark’s program is an attempt at solving a problem so complex, so embedded in historical and structural context, that tackling it requires a multifaceted effort. He recognizes that the police, the courts and the legislature all have roles to play.

Missouri’s recent changes to gun laws might make Clark’s job much harder, according to University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, because gun permits are no longer required by law. He says people who use guns in crimes usually get them through people they know and that eliminating permit requirements makes guns cheaper and more accessible.

“My best guess is that (the laws) will worsen conditions in those communities,” Rosenfeld says.

“Guns do not fall out of the sky into the hands of criminals or law-abiding people.”

BUILDING BRIDGES

One weekend, a 17-year-old boy was attending New Horizon Seventh Day Christian Church in North St. Louis County, just a few miles west of Page Boulevard.

The next weekend, he was dead. The church’s pastor, B.T. Rice, says he felt like every week or so he was presiding over another funeral of a young person who’d been shot and killed. He had to do something.

So he founded the St. Louis Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence, or SIRV. When Rice first moved to St. Louis from Denver in 1979, he realized he had a lot of work to do. “I’ve reached the point where I can’t straighten it all out because it ain’t going to get straightened out just by me,” he says as he sits with Matt Brummund and Steven Parish, who both work with SIRV, at his office at New Horizon Christian Church. He’s talking about gun violence in his community, but he’s also talking about all the other disparities that fuel violence.

To the west of the church is Kinloch, a once-vibrant black community. It developed in the early 1900s as a haven for those who’d been excluded from other communities by racist covenants and discriminatory lending practices. Kinloch is now almost completely abandoned. Lambert-St. Louis International Airport started buying up nearby property in the 1980s to expand, and the population has plummeted since. In 2015, the estimated median household income was $13,542, according to the American Community Survey.

Historically, loose incorporation rules made it easy for white homeowners to create tiny municipalities just outside the city to restrict access through land use zoning. Whites had the power to control who moved

into their communities in a way that other minority groups didn’t.

When white families moved to the suburbs in the ’50s and ’60s, they took accumulated wealth and educational advantages with them. Black families faced too many obstacles to leave just yet. They were able to move to the small inner suburbs of North County in the ’70s and ’80s, and once again, the black community was isolated.

Rice, Parish and Brummund rattle off a list of issues that come with that history: access to health care, grocery stores, transportation and jobs. Brummund is an FBI agent who collaborates closely with SIRV. He says there’s a lack of parental involvement in the parent-teacher association at the Saint Louis public school his two middle-schoolers attend. “Something that you would just take for granted at most schools, isn’t there,” Brummund says.

Parish runs an in-school program through SIRV that teaches kids about topics such as toxic stress and conflict resolution. “We’re talking about the age-old issue of what happens in oppressed, depressed and suppressed communities,” he says.

“Violence is just an outgrowth.”

This is exactly the type of conversation Rice wanted to start when he founded SIRV about four years ago. Its goal is to bring different people together who are working to end gun violence: such as a white FBI agent, a black community worker and a black pastor.

“Pastor (Rice) can get everyone in the same room,” Brummund says. “When you get around the issue of gun violence, it can be very divided. The police perceive it one way, and that community that’s suffering from the violence feels it a different way, and they’re kind of at odds.”

The members of SIRV think improving police-community relations through ride-along programs and door-to-door relationship building is key to reducing gun homicide. “(What) we generally encounter is their fear of the police ­— and we’ve got to dispel that fear,” Rice says.

Outside inner city neighborhoods, people don’t understand the problem or how complex it is, he says. “If you tell them the police acted inappropriately, they say, ‘You must be crazy.’”

The disconnect affects the way the legislature regulates guns. Rice says lawmakers should cut the Top: Shawn Randle, far left, has her hair straightened by stylist Karla Hogan at a barber shop in the 6th District. Pastor Rice says he has been a customer of the shop for many years.

A pitbull is chained by a mostly boarded-up house on the 6000 block of West Florissant Avenue. The house sits on the border of the Jennings and 6th District neighborhoods which form the focal point of Pastor B. T. Rice’s SIRV initiative.

THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

92% of Missouri gun homicides are in predominantly urban counties

70 PERCENT

of homicides in St. Louis occurred in North St. Louis

44 PERCENT

of total gun homicides in Missouri were commited in St. Louis

Learn where gun violence impacted Missouri the most in 2016

5%

92 PERCENT

of Missourians live in

of people in North St. Louis neighborhoods are black.

S T. L O U I S

1 in 5

homicides in St. Louis occur in three neighborhoods, The Greater Ville, JeffVanderLou and Wells Goodfellow.

Sources: Gun Violence Archive, U.S. Census, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department

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flow of guns into his community rather than allowing easier access, but the people making those decisions aren’t the ones impacted by the results. “They don’t have to have the kids get on the floor once they hear ‘pop, pop, pop’ in the middle of the night,” he says.

Last fall, the former St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s police chief, Sam Dotson, who sits on SIRV’s board, spoke against recent changes to Missouri’s gun laws such as deleting the training requirement.

“When you take that away, you take away their proficiency in the weapon,” he says. “You take away their understanding of how to interact with law enforcement. I really believe that it leaves everybody in the community more at risk, makes our job more dangerous and at the end of the day, I think that we see more violence not less violence.”

Pamela Price, left, waits with Ta-Lajia Malvine, 4, near the corner of West Florissant Avenue and Jennings Station Road.

Pastor B.T. Rice says the corner has suffered from incidents of gun violence in the past months and is only a few blocks from where police fatally shot Thaddeus McCarroll 15 times in 2015.

FACES NOT FORGOTTEN

1833

EXTERMINATION ORDER Tension between Jackson County residents and Mormons peaks when a violent mob chases Mormons from the county. The state of Missouri decides to separate the Mormons from the general population via the newly created Caldwell County. Ongoing tension will lead to some Missourians taking up arms against Mormons at the polls, as they try to vote. Gov. Lilburn Boggs eventually gives his extermination order, mandating the expulsion of Mormons by any means necessary, including deadly force.

1861-1865 CIVIL WAR

1864

Missouri becomes a hotbed for pro-Confederate guerrilla warfare, which state officials combat by passing various firearm restrictions.

“In some parts of Missouri, where guerrilla warfare was especially problematic, there were restrictions on the possession of weapons for both loyal and disloyal persons,” says Dennis Boman, professor of history at Lindenwood University in St. Charles. “The enforcement difficulties were as problematic then as now.” None of the new measures stopped the violence.

CENTRALIA MASSACRE On Sept. 27, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson and 30 guerrillas ride into Centralia and rob Union sympathizers’ homes, stores and depots. Piling ties onto the railroad track, Anderson and his gang stop an inbound train carrying 25 Union soldiers on leave. Anderson has the soldiers hauled from the train and 24 are executed, in what is now known as the Centralia Massacre. At the time, Missouri is home to about 4,000 guerrilla fighters, a force that eventually requires approximately 60,000 Union troops to subdue.

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A mile away from New Horizon Christian Church, five quilts hang in a gallery on the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ North Campus. Hand-painted portraits, mostly of young black faces, are tied together with black ribbon. On the other side of the room, cardboard cut-outs of outstretched arms stick up from a pile of dirt. “Hands up, don’t shoot” reads a sign.

The Faces Not Forgotten project is Christine Ilewski’s way of healing. Her father died by gun suicide when she was 20 years old, and then her close friend died by gun homicide. After the losses, she started painting portraits of young people in St. Louis who’d been shot and killed. She’s now expanded the project to cities across the country, recruiting local artists to paint the vignettes. She says the pictures comfort the victims’ families.

“The premise of the whole project is that I feel a hand-painted portrait is a sign of dignity and honor,” Ilewski says. “Just the power of looking at a wall of faces, I feel empowered more to say stop it, look at this, this is what is happening. How can you look at these faces and look away?”

Ilewski fights misconceptions and prejudices against families who’ve lost kids to gun violence. “(People think) they must have been in trouble — dealing drugs,” she says. “So many are in community college, top performing students.”

She doesn’t understand why the legislature isn’t doing more to save them.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

CAUGHT BETWEEN THE

CAPITOL AND THE

EMERGENCY ROOM Some Missouri doctors say gun violence is a public health crisis – and recent legislation won’t help by

RENEE HICKMAN DAVIS WINBORNE

photos by

I

n 2014, about four years after she started practicing medicine, Dr. Pam Choi, chief surgery resident at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, was working an overnight shift when her pager buzzed. A tiny patient was headed to the emergency room. “When you see that page come across — ‘13-month old baby, GSW (gunshot wound)’ — your blood just runs cold and you’re like, ‘Oh my God; what should I expect?’” she says.

Before coming to St. Louis, Choi thinks she saw only one patient who’d been shot — a man who came into the ER while she was on a surgery rotation as a medical student at the University of Rochester.

She grew up in the Northern New Jersey suburb of Franklin Lakes, one of the safest towns in the state.

Her family never owned a gun, and gun violence was neither part of her personal experience nor an issue she thought about much.

Choi arrived at St. Louis Children’s Hospital for her residency and witnessed with horror the regularity with which children were brought into in the emergency room with firearm injuries. The incidents began to blur together in her memory.

She cannot remember her first child gunshot victim,

Mary Hennings talks but she remembers the about her son Michael 13-month-old boy.

Hennings, who was He had been shot killed in 2014 in a as his mother held him shooting along with a in her arms. Only vague woman he was dating. details were relayed to Hennings, a gunshot Choi as the paramedics survivor herself, lost rushed the baby across her other son, Alvin the city in the night, but Hennings Jr., to gun she thinks the bullets violence in 1989. were meant for someone else. The baby was just in the way.

Choi and her team raced to the trauma bay and waited for the ambulance to arrive. She found herself standing very still as she focused on how she would deal with all the possible scenarios. Would there be cardiac injuries? How much blood loss would there be? Was the ambulance taking a long time, or did it just feel that way? She and her colleagues exchanged only a few words. Did they have all the supplies they needed? Were they ready? The younger the patients, the less likely they are to survive traumatic injuries.

The boy arrived in the ambulance with his mother. As paramedics wheeled him into the emergency room, Choi pulled the mother aside into a quiet conference room and explained where

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they were taking her son. As she explained that surgeons would operate on the baby, the sobbing mother begged them to do whatever they could. Choi promised that they would, but experience had taught her that even in the best of circumstances, doctors never quite know what will happen after a patient enters the ER. The boy was crying loudly when the paramedics rushed him in. He’d been shot once, but the single bullet in his small body had done enough damage to threaten his life. As Choi and her team worked, he got weaker, and his cries grew softer. He struggled to breathe. The doctors worked for several hours to stabilize him and complete the operation. Finally, it became clear that he would live.

Despite the victory of the boy’s survival, Choi continues to be disturbed by that night. “They bring in this baby, and he’s bawling, and he’s chubby,” she says. As his recovery dragged on, she could only think that he didn’t belong there.

He should be like any other 1-year-old, happily learning and exploring his world.

The longer she worked, the more frustrated Choi became watching one child gunshot victim after another appear on her operating table. On average, between April 2008 and March 2013, there were six firearm injuries per month in children under 16 in St. Louis.

It was easier to think of the problem the way she’d been trained to, in terms of epidemics — the way one might ponder an outbreak of polio, the flu or the spread of HIV. If children were being hurt and killed by something in the world, causes could be researched and solutions implemented.

St. Louis Children’s Hospital has one of two Level I trauma centers equipped to treat pediatric gunshot injuries in the St. Louis metro area.

During intake, social workers interview patients and their families to determine the circumstances surrounding their injuries. Choi recognized that her facility was uniquely positioned to gather data on gunshot wounds and homicides of children in the region and the factors that led to them.

She and the other co-authors of the study “Firearm injuries in the pediatric population: A tale of one city” looked at the children who arrived at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, the other pediatric Level I trauma unit in the area, over a period of five years from 2008 to 2013. During that period, they documented 398 gunshot injuries in children — one of the highest rates in the nation. For comparison, a similar study done in Colorado over nine years recorded 129 gunshot injuries in children. A study over 10 years in Detroit recorded 289. The children were shot in the city and in the suburbs, as bystanders to crime and in accidents. Slightly fewer than half were in their own homes.

The high rates of gun violence in St. Louis have led to numerous intervention attempts by agencies, private organizations and law enforcement. Programs for at-risk youth have been launched, community forums are held regularly, and in 2014, St. Louis County 14

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established a curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. for minors under 17.

Still, the issue has persisted. In fact, Choi noticed that during the period she studied, before the curfew laws were in place, most gun injuries actually happened outside curfew hours, between 6 p.m. and midnight.

A significant change in gun violence rates did occur recently. After 2007, the year Missouri legislators repealed a law requiring gun owners to obtain a license proving they’d passed a background check, firearm homicide rates spiked. Afterward, the rates continued to rise, jumping 23 percent through 2010, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy Research.

When asked how she thinks the new “permitless carry” and “stand your ground” legislation will affect the situation in her emergency room, Choi is less than optimistic. “I don’t think it will help,” she says.

Many doctors in St. Louis echo the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians in saying they want to approach gun violence affecting both children and adults as a public health issue, disentangling research and preventative measures from the partisan politics of gun legislation.

Dr. William Powderly is the director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, which launched the Gun Violence Initiative in 2015 to explore the issue in the city. To illustrate their approach, Powderly uses road safety as an analogy. Early on, U.S. drivers had to follow few rules. They could drive with a drink and without a seatbelt, to deadly ends.

“We had carnage Dr. Pam Choi is chief surgery resident at St. Louis on the roads, and this Children’s Hospital. The was clearly recognized hospital’s trauma bay is as a public health issue,” where injured victims arrive Powderly says. “And over after being shot. “If people the next 30, 40 years, we could see what happens gradually made driving a when someone is brought much safer enterprise in here after being shot, I think the United States.” their minds would change,” But in Missouri (and she says. in the U.S.), guns are not like cars. Politics have so thoroughly saturated any discussion about gun safety that some doctors change their word choice to make gun owners more receptive to their ideas.

Dr. Robert Kennedy, a pediatrician who, like Choi, works in the emergency room at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, would rather not use the term “gun control,” for instance. “When you use that language a lot of people tune you out,” he says.

Kennedy has been in the field for about 40 years.

Sitting in his house in St. Louis, he clicks through slides of data on gunshot injuries to children in St. Louis on his computer — locations, ages, intentional or unintentional — and recounts one tragic story after another. There was the child who thought a family handgun was a squirt-gun, the 12-year-old who didn’t mean to shoot his friend after finding a gun in his grandfather’s bedroom, the father who accidentally shot his infant son while in the car. On and on and on.

In 2013, not long after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Kennedy wrote an op-ed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with fellow St. Louis Children’s Hospital physicians David Jaffe and Martin Keller. In it, they called gun violence in St. Louis a public health crisis. The doctors implored readers to support recommendations by a host of medical professional organizations that wanted to ban assault weapons and large ammunition magazines and end federal restrictions on funding research into gun violence.

But today, Kennedy has stopped looking to legislative solutions to help halt the flow of gunshot victims into his emergency room. “I don’t think there is any way to get any legislation passed right now with the mentality that we have,” he says.

He prefers simple measures doctors might take, such as asking more questions while documenting patient medical histories. Queries about gun ownership and storage would appear alongside questions such as, “How many alcoholic drinks do you have per week?”

But in some cases, those questions have been politicized. In 2011, a Florida law backed by the National Rifle Association barred doctors from asking patients whether they kept guns in their homes. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently struck down the law, saying it violated doctors’ rights to free speech. Missouri doctors are currently allowed to ask about firearm ownership and safety, but no law can require them to ask about guns in the home or document gun ownership as part of a patient’s history.

If doctors and public health experts are seeking treatments to what they view as an epidemic, Mary Hennings could be considered a survivor of the disease. Hennings is recovering from her fourth surgery following her 2013 gunshot injury.

On a warm evening in March, she moves with difficulty around her daughter’s home in Jennings, a St. Louis suburb. She looks for the right place to sit so

as not to irritate her left hip, which was recently replaced. She points to the spots where the bullet entered her leg and then traveled upward. A long, deep scar marks its path.

Hennings was standing in front of her son Michael’s house when she was shot. She was about to head into the city with a few family members and friends. But then Michael had to use the bathroom, someone else forgot their phone charger and the trip was delayed. Hurrying to make her appointment, Hennings went to get the charger.

Before she could open the door, she fell to the ground, confused, and tried to move but couldn’t. As the pain spread through her leg, she heard more rounds being fired and understood what was happening. She prayed for the shooter to run out of bullets and for the pain to stop. To this day, the case is unsolved.

Hennings’ godson, Anthony, ran to her on the porch. He is so much a part of her family that he calls her “Mama.” As she bled onto the steps, he ripped off his shirt. “Mama, this is gonna hurt,” he told her as he used the shirt to create a tourniquet. Later, a doctor told Hennings his action had probably saved her life.

This was not the first time Hennings had experienced gun violence. Her son Alvin was shot and killed in 1989 in the St. Louis area. Five months after Hennings was shot, her son Michael was also killed with a firearm.

1874

1885

NO HIDDEN WEAPONS ALLOWED

RISE OF THE VIGILANTES

Post-Civil War lawlessness in Missouri leads to a rise in vigilantism. “You had a lot of people fighting who weren’t actually in either army,” says Boone County Historical Society historian Al Viola. To combat the surge in violence, the state legislature bans concealed weapons in churches, schoolrooms, election polls, courtrooms and public assemblies. Lawmakers enforce it against freed slaves, and thwart their ability to defend themselves, says Kevin Jamison, author of Missouri Weapons and Self-Defense Law. In 1875, the state will effectively ban concealed weapons of any kind, anywhere, for the next 128 years.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

1945

CONSTITUTION, REVISED

Lawmakers revise the state Ex-Union soldier Nathaniel constitution of 1875, Kinney is frustrated with modernizing the language Missouri’s lawlessness. He and on the concealed-weapons about 100 other men start The ban. The clause “but Bald Knobbers, an armed gang, nothing herein contained depicted below in the movie is intended to justify the The Shepherd of the Hills. Soon practice of wearing after, Eglinton resident Frank concealed weapons” Taylor gets into a dispute with is changed to “but this local store owners, trashes the shall not justify the property and, with his brother, wearing of shoots the owners, concealed who survive. The weapons.” brothers turn themselves in, but the Knobbers attack the jail and lynch the Taylors. They leave a note that reads: “Beware!

These are the first victims to the wrath of outraged citizens. More will follow.”

Mary Hennings holds a picture of her son Michael Hennings. His hat commemorates a friend who also died after being shot.

Michael Hennings’ daughter sits at the kitchen table. She is focused intensely on her homework, while Mary Hennings points to scrapbooked pictures of Michael. The pictures show a handsome man in his 30s who smiles easily back at the camera. Hennings likes to remember doing work around the house with Michael, fighting over who would cut the grass. Shortly before he died, he told Hennings he was going to barber school, so he could cut hair for a living like his mother. “Michael was a good guy,” Hennings says gazing at the photos. At times, she closes her eyes against the tears.

Hennings hopes the hip replacement will be her last surgery. Her daughter, Kimberly, takes care of her daily needs but is overbooked with two jobs, one in health care and another at the hair salon she owns.

She is impatient to be able to move around more easily. She wants to spend more time with local advocacy groups working to stop gun violence in St. Louis and wants to start working as a barber again.

Hennings says there are too many guns in her neighborhood, and she thinks Missouri’s new “permitless carry” law will worsen the problem. Guns are “getting in the wrong hands,” she says. But she is torn on the issue. Hennings owns a gun herself. She wonders if, had she been able to reach the weapon, she might’ve been able to stop the man who shot her.

1977

PRELUDE TO CASTLE DOCTRINE Velma Gardner, a Kansas City resident, shoots and kills her husband in the driveway of their home as he attempts to hit her with his car. Gardner is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to a year in prison.

Gardner acted in self-defense but is held accountable because she exited the front door and approached the driveway before firing the gun: the courts rule that she had a “duty to retreat” before resorting to lethal force. The courts decide that people may defend themselves with lethal force only while inside their homes. Thirty years later, the legislature prevents the possibility of similar actions by passing the Castle Doctrine, expanding the legal use of deadly force to anywhere on one’s property.

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born in this class, Roberts says.

The bill that mandated gun education for first-graders, for example, was first sketched out by a Republican state senator here in 2012. (It’s probably also the only law name-dropping a singing, animated eagle named Eddie. In the National Rifle Association-sponsored video, Eddie sings that kids should run away if they find a gun. The song is surprisingly catchy).

When the legislators entered, they were handed an article entitled “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” written by a police trainer named Dave Grossman. That language may sound familiar if you’ve seen the 2014 film American Sniper. In an early scene, a father tells his son: The planet can be divided into wolves, sheepdogs and sheep. One needs to be a sheepdog to protect the sheep. This idea is what drives Burke. “I hate the term, ‘don’t take the law into your own hands,’” he says in class. “I wish more people would.”

For Burke, guns are not the point. The point is being prepared to confront danger, violently if necessary. Burke wants to train sheepdogs, and he’s critical of anything that preaches otherwise.

This includes curriculum from the Department of Homeland Security that tells people to first try to run away from an active shooter. Lots of schools, including the University of Missouri, teach “Run, hide, fight.” But Burke says that the system doesn’t work because “fight” never gets taught.

The proper role for an armed sheepdog is up for debate, especially among law enforcement. Paul Williams, Springfield’s police chief, says he is open to the possibility of armed citizens helping keep the peace — ­ but only if they have training. Sam Dotson, St. Louis’ former Metropolitan Police Department’s police chief, disagrees: “Springfield is different than St. Louis. Armed citizens coming to the aid of police officers creates more problems than it solves.” Both chiefs were vocal opponents of legislation allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons without permits.

“My concern is someone without training or education on how to use a weapon,” Williams says.

“Or someone who shouldn’t have one.”

Purchasing a gun at a store in Missouri still initiates a background check by the FBI, but that check involves a federal database that excludes a lot of local documentation. When the legislature canceled the permit requirement, it also got rid of another hurdle citizens had to clear in order to legally conceal and carry. Major Tom Reddin, who oversees the Boone County Sheriff’s Department conceal carry permit program, says the department used to reject a handful of applicants each year because of troubling background information they learned from a local, not a federal, agency.

This debate is occurring at a moment when there are more guns in the state of Missouri than at any point in recent history. Although one background check does not necessarily equal one gun sold, it is still a helpful barometer of overall gun sales — and there were more than 600,000 checks in Missouri last year, the highest number this century. Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Bar Association, among others, have argued that more guns do not equal more security, James Avenell goes to check his son’s target at Green Valley Rifle & Pistol Club in Hallsville.

THE WOLF AT THE DOOR An annual firearms class advocates a specific worldview for protecting yourself, and the lawmakers who attend are reshaping Missouri’s gun laws. by

BLAKE NELSON

T

photos by

ANNALIESE NURNBERG

he PowerPoint image on the projector screen showed a young girl huddled in a corner, near the words “When the wolf pounds at your door.” On the opposite wall were the framed portraits of all 31 Missouri state troopers who have been killed in the line of duty in the state’s history. Seated in between was a group of Missouri lawmakers, aides and Capitol employees.

They had gathered at the Missouri State Troopers’ Association headquarters in Jefferson City for an annual concealed carry weapons class offered specifically for state legislators.

The two walls were appropriate bookends for one of the key messages of the class: We are under an ever-present threat of violence, and an armed citizenry is the first line of defense.

To understand that worldview is to understand why Missouri gun laws have changed so dramatically over the past decade. That worldview and this class are also why the laws might continue to loosen.

Class began at 10 a.m. None of the lawmakers needed to be there, strictly speaking.

Since Jan. 1, Missourians who want to carry a concealed weapon need no training to do so.

The law used to mandate eight hours of firearm education for those who wanted to carry concealed weapons. The state still mandates that hunters receive training, and schools must teach firearm safety to first-graders. But holstering a pistol underneath a jacket is legal from the moment the gun is purchased. The state still offers concealed carry weapon permits for those who want formal training, but new permit applications don’t necessarily signify the same level of training that they used to. Now, you only need to complete a one-hour online class and fire off 40 rounds at a range.

This class, however, remained eight hours. The man who greeted everyone at the door, blue rubber gun at his side, wouldn’t have it any other way. Todd Burke is a reserve officer with the Hallsville Police Department. Several attendees enrolled specifically because of Burke’s reputation as an instructor. Anything less than four hours in the classroom and four hours on a shooting range simply wasn’t enough for him.

Burke directed students toward the conference room, where the other main instructor, Dale Roberts, was waiting. Roberts is the former head of the state’s Alcohol and Tobacco Control and currently directs a police officer’s union in mid-Missouri. Legislation has been 16

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especially when combined with “stand your ground” laws like Missouri’s. The advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety agreed and published a map showing recent school shootings to make that point.

Part of the class’ rebuttal to those findings is controversial or common-sense, depending on your perspective. Burke’s presentation included that same map of school shootings, which was used to make the opposite point: People might think twice about violence if they thought their potential victim was armed.

IMMEDIATE IMPACT

Burke clicked through more PowerPoint slides. Time on a shooting range would happen later. This day was all about when it’s OK to shoot.

Burke says he’s glad citizens no longer need a permit to carry. But he says he still strongly believes that citizens should sign up for training on their own.

At the moment, however, many Missourians seem content to forgo training. The Missouri State Highway Patrol processes the required fingerprints that are used when citizens apply for concealed carry permits.

Over the past several years, the highway patrol has recorded an increase in checks. In the first three months of 2017, however, the number of checks plummeted.

Counties have noticed the decrease too. The Boone County Sheriff’s Department, which oversees permit applications in one of the fastest-growing counties in the state, usually processes more than 1,000 applications per year. During the first quarter of last year, the department processed more than 1,200 applications for concealed carry weapon permits; but after the first quarter of this year, the department had received just 92 applications, which suggests that there are more guns and fewer permits.

Missouri still lists 17 public and private spaces where guns are not allowed, though Burke explained that carrying a concealed weapon into a prohibited area leads to very different penalties depending on whether you have a permit. If somebody with a permit carries a concealed weapon into an area where it’s banned, such as a bar, stadium or amusement park, he or she will face a $100 fine at most. But if someone without a permit did the same thing, he or she could be charged with a misdemeanor, which would ironically prevent them from later getting a permit.

In class, this was news to Rep. Mike Moon, R-Ash Grove. He returned to his office afterward and told his assistant, Rush Loftis, what he learned. He spent the day drafting a bill that would fully de-criminalize taking

a gun into a prohibited area, whether or not the person had a permit.

The bill, HB 1107, was filed the next day. That evening, Moon posted a video on Facebook, saying the CCW class had taught him something he didn’t know about Missouri gun law. “You, as a permitless carrier of a concealed firearm, can be fined up to $1,000, and even serve jail time if you take your gun into a place that’s prohibited, like a school or a federal building,” Moon said into the camera. “This is a problem.”

It’s possible the future of that bill will be influenced by one of Moon’s classmates, Rep. Chuck Basye, R-Rocheport. Basye was recently appointed the chair of the brand new Subcommittee on Second Amendment Preservation in the Missouri House. The subcommittee, made up of four Republicans and two Democrats, was created to help handle the wave of new gun legislation that’s been filed.

The committee had its first hearing in March.

When Kristin Bowen, a member of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, testified against a bill that would allow guns on college campuses, Basye acknowledged her concern and then pushed back.

“Criminals that don’t follow the law are gonna carry anyway,” Basye said. “Would you not agree, though, that individuals who would like to protect themselves should have that ability?”

Bowen answered from a different angle. “College students are still young,” she said. “I think it’s not worth the risk.” She listed a variety of situations that made her nervous, including a gun accidentally going off and the prevalence of domestic violence.

This divide was evident during other testimonies.

Those in favor of further loosening gun laws spoke almost exclusively about mass shootings. The world is made up of the criminals and the law-abiding, they said. Why shouldn’t we be armed when the wolf pounds at our door? Those hesitant to allow guns in more places focused on what could go wrong when people have the capacity, but not necessarily the training, to stop an attacker. Basye listened to every testimony with a poker face. Any recommendation out of his committee could impact the bill’s future.

Two weeks later, Basye presented a report that recommended the allowance of guns in more locations, such as polling places, bars, hospitals, day cares and stadiums. The two Democrats were opposed to Jonah Avenell, 17, top, and his father, adopting it. Basye and the two James Avenell, other Republicans present practice for last voted in favor. The report was year’s NRA Bianchi approved.

Cup in Hallsville.

2003 THE RETURN OF CONCEALED CARRY The Missouri House of Representatives overturns the state’s concealed-carry ban after 128 years. Eighty-four of the state’s 162 representatives sponsor the bill, legalizing concealed carry. Opponents try to overturn the law, arguing it violates the constitution. The Missouri Supreme Court says the constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid concealed guns and state lawmakers have the authority to decide who can carry them and under what circumstances. Missouri is one of 46 states allowing concealed carry.

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF FREEPIK

2005

NATIONAL BIRTH OF ‘STAND YOUR GROUND’ The Florida Legislature passes the nation’s first “stand your ground” law. To critics’ dismay, the new law allows those acting in self-defense to use deadly force in public. Twenty-four states have now passed “stand your ground” laws.

2006 ‘CASTLE DOCTRINE’ BECOMES LAW Lawmakers introduce Senate Bill 62, Missouri’s version of the “castle doctrine.” Without needing to retreat into one’s home, homeowners may use lethal force to defend oneself, family, home, property or vehicle as long as they “occupy” that property. Gun purchasers no longer need a permit to purchase a concealable firearm, a mandate that has been in place since 2004. The law passes easily — ­­­ 151 to six.

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FIGHT LIKE A

MOM Battling lax gun laws seems trying — but volunteers with the country’s largest gun violence prevention advocacy organization don’t back down

by AARON REISS photo by EVAN COBB

A

bout 20 women walk into a Jefferson City bar on the first Tuesday in April, and they encounter a few glances. It’s hard not to look at lots of people wearing identical red T-shirts, the signature of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. It’s the mark of a volunteer for one of the largest grassroots organizations battling over gun legislation in the U.S. It’s around 6 p.m., nearly two hours after the scheduled start time for a hearing in front of the Missouri House General Laws Committee. Some Moms are supposed to testify today in opposition of two bills, but lawmakers are still discussing the state budget. So for now, the Moms are on the deck of Paddy Malone’s Pub, the only place with enough seating for what they say is the state chapter’s largest ever turnout for a hearing. About 40 Moms volunteers — most of whom are women — made it to Jefferson City, but some couldn’t wait out the delay. In Missouri there are Moms groups in Columbia, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cape Girardeau and Springfield, all of which consist entirely of volunteers.

This is the nature of grassroots organizations: volunteers travel from all over the state, sometimes with as little as 24 hour’s notice, and hope the hearing they arrive for actually happens. The fight against loosening gun bills can seem like a hopeless pursuit in Missouri, where Gov. Eric Greitens campaigned with a commercial of himself shooting a machine gun.

But Moms volunteers say they still think their work

is vital. “We are going to be playing defense all the time,” says Kristin Bowen, leader of Moms’ Columbia group. “We are going to be in a situation where we have losses.”

Moms is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, which includes two groups in addition to Moms. In total, Everytown claims more than 3 million supporters.

Moms had a large presence during the saga of SB 656 — the bill that introduced the ability to carry a concealed weapon without training or permit and the “stand your ground” law, which expanded the ability to shoot in self defense in public places without retreating. The National Rifle Association pushed the veto override of Gov. Jay Nixon as its top national priority. If Moms accomplishes nothing else, drawing attention to the topic is a little victory for Bowen. Her husband works at MU as an English professor, and she was inspired to start the Columbia’s Moms chapter to counteract concealed carrying on college campuses. She makes sure to remember she’s only a volunteer. It helps ease the anxious feelings that can come with the work.

2010

2012

PRELUDE TO ‘STAND YOUR GROUND’

TRAYVON MARTIN

Shauntay Henderson shoots and kills DeAndre Parker outside a Kansas City gas station as he tries to run her down with his truck. Henderson says she feared for her life and shot Parker. Acquitted of second-degree murder, she’s convicted of voluntary manslaughter and armed criminal action because she failed to retreat. The court says an individual is entitled to use deadly force if they reasonably believe it is necessary to defend themselves against death, severe injury or “forcible felony.”

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Last month, the Missouri Moms Demand Firearms Coalition took Action volunteers visit the Missouri a picture of Bowen’s back Capitol to appear at showing her Moms Demand hearings, sometimes Action tote bag slung over with less than 24 her shoulder, and posted it hour’s notice. on Facebook. Comments on the Facebook post expressed annoyance (“It does show a lack of knowledge...sad”), sexism (“For them to be such concerned mom’s they sure don’t spend much time with their kids. Lol”) and threats (“SOMEBODY SHOOT THEM”).

Commenters on the Missouri Firearms Coalition page suggest the Moms volunteers are paid protesters from New York. That falsehood is a belief held by many Moms opponents. It’s rooted in the group’s partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety, which billionaire former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg helped found.

At Paddy Malone’s Pub, most of the conversation around Bowen isn’t about legislation or lobbyists.

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida, shoots and kills Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, sparking national outrage and debate over the meaning of self-defense, the use of lethal force and the role of race in gun violence. The following summer, Zimmerman is acquitted of second-degree murder.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVID GOLDMAN/AP

Guns seem escapable for the moment. Margaret Booker from Columbia is knitting a placemat with pink yarn.

She’s 55 years old and says she just reached “this plateau where I can see trends all of the sudden.

“Having that history is really important for me, in terms of having hope,” Booker says. “I’m not so scared. I don’t listen to the fear mongering.” Which explains her attitude when photos of Moms volunteers show up on opponents’ Facebook pages.

The Missouri Firearms Coalition posted a photo that was originally on the Missouri Moms’ page on April 5.

It showed Moms volunteers smiling in Hearing Room 5, where the General Laws committee meets. “Anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg has his gun-grabbing troops on the ground in full force today,” the post read.

“They’re all waiting for the chance to testify against your Second Amendment rights!”

“I love that we’re all ‘going to testify,’ ” Bowen tells the others. Only a few Moms are planning to testify.

“Nothing bad in the first five comments,” Booker says.

“Yeah there is,” says Mary Gross, another volunteer. “‘Gun-grabbing liberals.’ That’s us.”

“No death threats,” Booker says.

“Now let’s talk about gun-free zones,” says Nick Schroer, R-O’Fallon, a member of the House General Laws committee. It’s April 10, six days after the Moms volunteers’ previous visit to Jefferson City. The legislature’s budget discussion ran long that day, so the committee hearing was postponed until April 24.

Schroer is in front of committee, presenting his bill, HB 96. If passed, it will allow people who sustain certain injuries at a business to sue the business for liability, if the business voluntarily restricted guns on its property at the time of the incident.

People are standing on both sides of the four rows of seating in the hearing room. A Lincoln University police officer is fanning himself with a sheet of paper.

Twenty-two people wearing Moms shirts are here, most of them packed on one side of the room. They’re engaged, occasionally cheering for questions they like.

Jon Carpenter, the committee’s ranking Democrat, presses Schroer on why the bill seems unfairly tilted in favor of businesses that allow guns. Under the bill, businesses that allow guns on their premises aren’t subject to the same liability lawsuits as companies that don’t.

“As a business owner, if you are not wantonly neglectful — extremely neglectful as you can say — then you are not going to be held liable,” Schroer says.

2014 SCHOOLS AND TEENAGERS The Missouri General Assembly passes a law allowing certified school employees to carry guns on campus and decreases the legal concealed carry age from 21 to 19.

The law, Senate Bill 656, is sponsored by Sen. Will Kraus, R-Lee’s Summit. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon vetoes the law but the legislature enacts it anyway, with a vote of 117 to 39.

“Why don’t we do that same standard for folks who do put the sign up (prohibiting guns)?” Carpenter asks.

“Frankly, sir, because I didn’t want to, with this bill,” Schroer says. One of the Moms laughs.

Schroer admits he just wants his bill to cause a discussion, adding that he doesn’t “want to have an Aurora, Colorado, shooting here. I don’t want to have a Santa Barbara here.” The Moms can be heard saying: “ugh” and “oh” and “oh my God.” Bowen eventually testifies in opposition of this bill. Sitting before the committee she says, “Rather than punishing business for prohibiting guns on their property, legislators, I’d ask you to focus on protecting our communities.”

Researchers and lawyers who work for Moms review volunteers’ prepared testimony before committee hearings. They offer volunteers research to cite and ensure testimony stays on message. Moms says the group is neither anti-gun nor anti-Second Amendment. Some volunteers mention that they own guns and enjoy sport shooting. “What is powerful about that, I think, is you can see that people from all different parts of Missouri can agree in the value and culture of responsible gun ownership,” Bowen says. “What we’re asking for is really reasonable, and it’s reasonable to people from different walks of life.”

The Moms’ action April 10 was a warm-up for a more pressing bill, HB 630, which would allow all citizens who can own guns to carry concealed firearms in places that are currently “gun-free zones”: polling places, local government buildings, state government buildings, the state Capitol, bars, child care facilities, riverboat gambling operations, gated areas of amusement parks, sports stadiums, churches, schools and hospitals. Some of these places, including the state Capitol and college campuses, would require people carrying concealed to have a permit.

Carpenter, the committee’s lead Democrat, shows he’s against this bill, too. “Let’s start on page one,” he says, looking at Rep. Jered Taylor. R-Nixa, the bill’s sponsor and another committee member. “Sound fun?”

Carpenter questions every place Taylor, who has pushed for cheaper guns and a state “tax holiday” for firearms purchases, wants to allow guns. “You actually want this to be a law?” he asks.

“Yes sir, I do,” says Taylor, who works as a field representative out of U.S. Congressman Billy Long’s Springfield office. It’s a job, according to his website, that allows him to understand “the challenges that small businesses in Missouri face.”

2015 ADOPTED: ‘STAND YOUR GROUND’ AND ‘PERMITLESS CARRY’

Sen. Brian Munzlinger, R-Williamstown, a farmer from northeastern Missouri, introduces a new Senate Bill 656.

He proposes eradicating the “duty to retreat,” along with the need for concealed carry permits. Again, the law passes easily, and legislators later overwhelmingly override another Nixon veto. Now anyone in Missouri may carry a concealed weapon in most public places without a permit.

“You want guns in all these places?” Carpenter asks.

“Yes, I do. I want individuals to be able to choose whether or not to carry a gun to protect themselves, and others, if the need were to arise.”

Committee chairman Rep. Robert Cornejo, R-St. Peters, an attorney from the 64th District, ends Carpenter’s inquiry time after about 20 minutes. He notes the extended questioning and sarcastically says he’ll give Carpenter a certificate. Then he calls for testimony in support of the legislation.

Alexandra Salsman, a political director for the Missouri Firearms Coalition, walks to the microphone with a box of signed yellow petitions in support of the concealed carry legislation. She stacks the papers about 2 feet high on the table in front of her. Thud, thud, thud.

“I do sincerely believe time is of the essence,” Salsman says during her quick testimony. She’s the second and last person to speak in support of the bill. Then it’s time for the opposition testimony, which will come from a lobbyist for the Kansas City Chiefs, a man speaking on behalf of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Jackson County Sports Authority, two campus police officers, community college administrators and four Moms volunteers. They’ll all claim that allowing concealed carry in their respective venues — college campuses, stadiums and day care centers — will create new dangers in these places.

Becky Morgan, the Missouri Moms chapter’s president, tells the committee about a mass shooting that wasn’t in a gun-free zone: A man in Tyrone fatally shot seven people before killing himself. The shooter invaded four homes to do the killing, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“Any questions? I’m seeing none. Thank you very much,” Cornejo says after Morgan finishes. As Rep. Peter Merideth, a rookie Democrat from St. Louis, comes back into the room Cornejo says, “Oh, Rep. Merideth has a question.”

“I wasn’t here when you introduced yourself,” Merideth says as he begins some political theater to show his support for Moms. “But I’ve been reading on Facebook and other places on a regular basis that you’re paid for by Bloomberg. Do you get a salary?”

“No sir, I do not,” Morgan says, playing along, a slight uptick of cheer in her voice.

“And you’re a volunteer?”

“That is correct.”

“And the folks with you here today, you’re all volunteers?”

“Every single one.”

“Do you all live in this state?”

The women in the red shirts say, with some unity, “Yes we do.”

2017

THE ROAD AHEAD Certain properties — such as airports and courthouses — remain off-limits to firearms. Uncertainty surrounds the new law in other places, such as the state Capitol, where legislators are permitted to carry weapons inside the House and Senate chambers. Colleges may still ban guns on campus, but if Rep. Jered Taylor, R-Nixa, has his way, this too might change.

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HIGHER (CALIBER) EDUCATION None of the following story is real.

We won’t know what an armed MU campus looks like unless it happens.

But a campus carry bill is gaining support in the Missouri legislature, and in a state with permissive firearm laws, it’s less of a question of “if” than “when.” Based on current MU policy, empirical data and the accounts of people at gun-friendly campuses (see annotations), we made an educated guess about what it might be like to show up as a student at an armed MU of the not-so-distant future. by

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DAN ROE

I

T’S 2020, AND SPRING HAS ARRIVED AT MU. The glow of a 70-degree day means the campus is ripe for people-watching. In the middle of Speaker’s Circle, a pasty white and perpetually shirtless system administrator known as Hack Man is back in his arena, juggling a fabric ball between his sneakers.

A man in a leather jacket walks in front of the uninhibited performer, but something about his gait steals your attention from footbag Larry Bird. He strides south with intent, right arm pressed over a bulge just above his hip. You lose sight of him in the passing-period fray, until the moment the crowd breaks and he resurfaces, only to slip into the Arts & Science Building —­with a gun.

Except it’s a legal gun. It’s been this way since you arrived on campus as a freshman in August 2019, when a law went into effect that allowed citizens with concealed carry permits to bring their guns into university buildings. During senior year at your suburban Kansas City high school, you read on Twitter that an MU law professor sued the school for banning guns in campus buildings. You remember watching a Daily Show segment about the University of Texas at Austin, where students brandished dildos to protest campus carry at their school.

Call of Duty was the extent of your firearms expertise. Now, as Hack Man juggles to a personal record in the background, you realize you’ve just subconsciously profiled a fellow student to figure out whether he could shoot you.

MISSOURIANS SAW IT COMING, but that didn’t stop protests from engulfing the campus in the fall of 2019. The freshman class and their families knew what they were getting into — Gov. Eric Greitens had signed campus carry into law for all four-year public universities, delaying the start date by 18 months to allow schools such as MU to plan. The new effective date was Aug. 1. Three weeks later, 30,000 students and faculty entered the equation.

The first protest started outside the Student Center. At least

In 2015, Royce de R. Barondes partnered with Columbia attorney Jennifer Bukowsky to sue the UM Board of Curators and former UM System President Tim Wolfe for violating an inalienable right to bear arms. The suit is still pending.

Alumna Jessica Jin started the protest because under the new law, dildos were banned on campus but not guns.

Missouri would be the 10th state to enact a campus carry law. Utah was first, in 2004. All 13 public four-year universities in Missouri oppose it.

Kansas gave public universities more than two years to prepare before setting a July 1, 2017 enactment date. Missouri Public universities have said they would ask for 18 months.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH SAWEY AND COURTESY OF KYLE SPRADLEY/FLICKR AND PIXABAY

UT Austin professor Mia Carter says press descended from all over the world to cover the Texas protest in August 2016.

The Dallas Morning News reported Austin protesters numbered in the hundreds and handed out 5,000 dildos. A Change.org anti-campus carry petition garnered nearly 9,000 signatures.

The Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center received anonymous threats the day after protests ended, and a Yik Yak user promised to “stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see.”

The five-minute video has more than 9,000 views on YouTube. MUPD offers individual active shooter training for students who request it.

Students for Concealed Carry is a real group with an MU chapter.

It claims gun-free zones are dangerous. A 2016 Johns Hopkins study found that only 12 percent of U.S. high-fatality mass shootings between 1966 and 2015 took place in gun-free zones.

Johns Hopkins public health researcher Daniel Webster says students might not carry concealed if the social stigma is too great. Conversely, they may feel like they need to. “When people feel at a greater risk of being shot, what they tend to do is carry guns,” Webster says.

The University of Arkansas enacted this policy to balance athletics and state demands.

LaMontagne canceled his UT Austin concert for this reason.

The New Yorker and Politifact verified claims of UT collaborators boycotting the university.

Carter was in France on university business when campus carry was enacted and says French faculty prospects were appalled by the law.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN MONE/AP

100 strong, the students held signs that read “MO’ guns, mo’ problemz” and “This isn’t what we meant by safe space.” Some strapped sex toys to their backpacks, a nod to UT Austin’s “Cocks Not Glocks” protest (and a direct violation of university rules). The raucous hoard drowned out a table of khaki-clad student government workers who were just trying to give out Tiger Stripe ice cream.

Professors joined the crowd — some told local media they were concerned about students being afraid to touch topics like race, gender and sexuality in their classrooms for fear of armed retribution.

Back at the dorm room, parents call. Word of the protests reached Kansas City, and they want to know you’re okay — they remember the death threats made during the CS1950 protests of 2015. Guns aren’t allowed in the dorms, you assure your mom and dad and remind them with more confidence than you feel that there has never been a mass shooting at a campus with conceal and carry.

In fairness, college parents already worry about domestic violence, sexual assault and a student’s disregard for common sense after a beer or seven. And parents do their homework: they’ve heard about the Northern Arizona University student who retrieved a pistol from his truck and killed a fellow student during a drunken altercation. And even if the gun-toting student isn’t the aggressor, what happens when a victim is unexpectedly relieved of his or her firearm?

AS A LAST RESORT, CAMPUS POLICE SAY YOU SHOULD CLOBBER YOUR ATTACKER WITH A STAPLER. That’s how a university employee in Jesse Hall fought off her attacker in “Run. Hide. Fight.,” MUPD’s instructional YouTube video for surviving an active shooter situation. The video predates campus carry, so comments read: “How about letting us defend ourselves with our (concealed firearm)?” and “I’d much rather die fighting for my life and the lives of others than defenseless on my knees.”

When you signed up for MU Alert, the university’s emergency information service, you were instructed to run, and if running wasn’t possible then hide, and if hiding wasn’t possible then defend yourself. You expected to be outgunned by the shooter, but fellow students now insist their best first move is drawing their weapons, acquiring a moving target and hitting it with no collateral damage.

Missouri Students for Concealed Carry was one of the few voices in the counter-protest. A once-sleepy chapter of nationwide advocacy group Students for Concealed Carry, the faction drew supporters from across the Midwest to back the new campus order. Their message: Criminals target gun-free zones, and armed citizens can and do stop mass shootings. They’re outnumbered compared to the anti-campus carry activists, and some might give in to social pressure to drop the argument, but the ones who remain outlast the once-vocal, gunless majority. By October, most of the campus carry opposition is drunkenly celebrating Homecoming in a campus-wide stupor that forgives and forgets about the enemy it can’t see.

ON THIS APRIL DAY IN THE YEAR 2020, EVEN AN UPPERCLASSMAN COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR NOT SEEING HOW THE CAMPUS CHANGED. Conceal and carry on campus did have some obvious aesthetic effects. Most visible were the additions of metal detectors and barricades to Memorial Stadium, which represented a compromise between the SEC and NCAA (which won’t tolerate guns at games) and the state (which required additional security to compensate for the security that was apparently lost by disarming 71,000 college football fans).

A more visible change, in the form of signage, posters and pamphlets, emerges with the warm weather: suicide awareness. You’ve known people who waited weeks for mental health services, and you’ve heard of students who died by suicide. The reports say most used firearms.

The campus may have accepted conceal and carry, but some visitors haven’t. Ray LaMontagne canceled an on-campus concert, and said he couldn’t support the principle.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that outside researchers are cutting their ties with MU. Administrators tell local media that they’re struggling to recruit new talent, and faculty members abscond to universities where nobody’s allowed to bring guns to school.

Exchange programs suffer. Rumors circulate that a recovering enrollment rate is about to plummet again.

Back in Speaker’s Circle, Hack Man is really on a roll. He must be a product of a different campus culture, one that existed before a shooter killed 32 people at Virginia Tech and made an entire country of law-abiding citizens fear one another to the point of mass armament.

At noon, the Reynolds Alumni Center clock tower sounds the alma mater and Hack Man lets the hacky sack fall to his foot before flicking it skyward.

The MU Office of Student Conduct bans displays of obscenity.

Carter says she and fellow professors were among the student ranks during the Texas protests. UT professor Lisa Moore says her students searched for seats near an exit in fear of offending students who were carrying concealed.

Campus carry laws have allowed universities to retain some control over setting reasonable gun-free zones. MU is against campus carry and would likely ban firearms in dorms. Across the SEC, Texas A&M University is one university that allows guns in student residences.

“I hadn’t realized they were gunshots until our school sent out texts,” says Caylie Hilgart, an NAU student. Arizona does not permit conceal and carry on campus.

Lincoln University Chief of Police Gary Hill testified at an April 10 campus carry hearing in Jefferson City: “Victims tell me they black out, now we have another weapon presented onto the streets.”

MUPD declined to comment on how they would adjust for campus carry. At UT, Associate Vice President for Campus Safety and Security Bob Harkin says the campus changed nothing and that Austin police have patrolled a city with concealed carry since 1995.

University police departments and their active shooter protocols advise students to flee or lock themselves in before confronting an attacker. Schools with campus carry, such as the University of Utah and Boise State University, don’t endorse an armed counter attack.

Moore says the majority of UT counter-protesters came from across the state.

Rampage Nation author Louis Klarevas analyzed pro-gun researcher John Lott’s claim of 39 separate instances where private citizens stopped mass shootings.

Klarevas found just four instances, and none were on college campuses.

Amid budget cuts, MU students report long wait times to see mental health professionals.

“Less than 1 percent of suicide attempts by firearms are not successful,” University of Central Missouri Chief of Police Scott Rhoad told the Missouri legislature in a campus carry hearing on April 10.

MU Faculty Council Chair Ben Trachtenberg says a vast majority of MU professors oppose campus carry.

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THE SCENE

Project Runway: Stephens College edition Designers learn how to manifest their ideas into a collection

BY CLARE ROTH

PHOTOS BY ERIN ACHENBACH LEFT: Senior Sarah Mills’ sketches illustrate her line that is targeted to southern women.

She wanted to create a southern lifestyle brand that wasn’t country or western.

RIGHT: Mills will show off this outfit and others during the Stephens College Fashion Show April 29.

LEFT: Senior Kathryn McCarthy looks at her work that she and other senior fashion students have worked on all year.

RIGHT: This piece will fit in the high-achieving, busy women’s wardrobe.

McCarthy did all the beadwork on this design herself.

Alphonse Mucha, who was kind of like At Stephens College, if you can the father of the Art Nouveau style in conceptualize it, you can create it.

France,” she says. He worked in fashion Senior designers Kathryn McCarthy about 100 years ago. and Sarah Mills have One of McCarthy’s worked on their Stephens STEPHENS pieces is a turquoise chiffon College Fashion Show COLLEGE shirt that exposes the back, collections for a year.

FASHION SHOW which she says would “Our professors Windsor cost $998. Her collection encouraged us to search Auditorium April 29, 2, 4:30 features luxury fabrics and our childhoods, think of and 7 p.m. bespoke, or custom-made, our favorite colors and $10 children/ patterns she created using an textures,” Mills says. After students, $20 Adobe program. Dolce and deciding their collection’s general, $40 VIP Gabbana would be one of her concepts, they started 876-7220 competitors in the market, designing for their ideal she says. customers.

Mills’ ideal customer is a young McCarthy’s ideal customer is a southern woman who is just starting her high-achieving, busy woman who loves family and career. She was inspired to luxury and being pampered. “She’s create a lifestyle brand after interning at probably going to be going to a lot of Vineyard Vines this past summer. events where she has to dress up, and she “They have something for every might have to go straight from work,” occasion of their customer’s life,” she she says. says. “It’s like a go-to brand.”

Her collection, which features luxury Mills was inspired by front porch fabrics such as silk, wool and denim, was sitting and a blue-and-white-floral inspired by the Art Nouveau movement. pattern she found at Fishman’s in “I am oftentimes really inspired Chicago. “My grandmother passed away by art and culture, so I looked a lot at 22

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WE CAN ALWAYS DO BETTER, WE CAN ALWAYS EXPAND OUR CONCEPT, WE CAN ALWAYS KEEP PUSHING AND ADDING ONTO IT. – KATHRYN MCCARTHY STEPHENS COLLEGE SENIOR DESIGNER my first week in college, and a weekend after that, my sister got married, so it was very tough on me,” Mills says. “But I always remember my favorite part was sitting on my front porch in southern Arkansas with my granny, just talking to her about life, hearing her stories even if she’s told me a hundred times. It’s my favorite place to be.”

Mills’ collection, which features classic designs and expert sewing, (she’s

been sewing since she was 8 years old) is at the contemporary level of design. This means it has similar pricing to Tori Burch or Draper James, ranging from $100 to $700, she says.

Both say obtaining a degree in fashion design is hard. McCarthy notes this is often because they’re creating collections entirely by themselves. If they were in the industry, they’d have teams of people breaking up the work.

“Our job is never finished,” Mills says. “We can always do better, we can always expand our concept, we can always keep pushing and adding onto it.”

Both Mills and McCarthy will keep their collections after the show.

Mills, who creates most of her garments in her own size, says her designs are simple because she likes the way she looks in classic silhouettes. “I want to be able to wear my clothes,” Mills says. “They make me happy.”

McCarthy also takes a sentimental approach. “If they were being mass produced, that would be a different story, or if I was designing for someone, but this is my baby,” she says.

THE TO-DO LIST

this week in Columbia

ARTS & CULTURE Final Show of MU Tonight with Lily FitzGibbon

First we bid farewell to Johnny Carson, then Jay Leno, then David Letterman. Now comes an exit to rival them all. MU’s own Lily FitzGibbon is graduating, and with that goodbye comes her final MU Tonight, a student-run tonight show. Don’t miss her departure complete with games, interviews and a musical guest. Friday, 8 p.m., The Shack, Free, 882-5493

Sewing Workshop and Fashion Show

Join the St. Louis Chapter of the American Sewing Guild for a day of fashion, sewing and fun. Enjoy informal modeling during lunch and hear the keynote address on digital design and fabric printing from MU’s Jean Parsons. Participate in one of three hands-on workshops: learn the Alabama Chanin technique; mend garments from the Boone County Historical Society’s collection or make useable items from fabric scraps.

Saturday, 12:30­­­–4 p.m., Boone County Historical Society Museum, $30-35, 314-420-2170

CIVIC Mastermind Exchange for Women Business Owners

Learn about the power of mastermind groups, which are designed to help navigate challenges. Experience this confidential, supportive space for women to come together and discuss adversity, ideas and success stories. First timers are always welcome. Today, 8–9 a.m., noon–1 p.m., Missouri Women’s Business Center, Free, 777-5235

Heart of MO Girls on the Run Spring 5K

Twelve sites in mid-Missouri are joining together for a day of fitness, fun and girl power. In addition to the race, there will be face painting and team photos on the day of the 5K. So get out, and walk/run/support the Heart of MO Girls on the Run. Saturday, 9 a.m., $30, $15 ages 3–12, 246-0844

FOOD & DRINK Maifest

Celebrate the beginning of spring the German way. Günter Hans is hosting its first-ever Maifest, which will include specials on pints and brats as well as decorating the maibaum (maypole). Say guten tag to these awesome Maifestivities. Tonight & Saturday, 5 p.m., Günter Hans, 256-1205

MUSIC Kristin Chenoweth

Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress and

songstress Kristin Chenoweth is known for her work on shows such as FOX’s hit comedy Glee. But she is perhaps best known as the original Glinda the Good Witch on Broadway’s smash-hit Wicked. She brings her powerful voice to Columbia for a one-night-only performance of some of the most unforgettable songs from Broadway and best-loved songs of the Great American Songbook. Tonight, 7 p.m., Missouri Theatre, $75–$125, 882-3781

Dressy Bessy with Arc Flash and Ray Wild Fans of blazing guitar riffs and groovy melodies rejoice. Dressy Bessy will be jamming at Cafe Berlin with Arc Flash and Ray Wild. Tonight, 8 p.m., Cafe Berlin, $8, 441-0400

The Matchsellers

It’s Friday night and the end of a long work week. What could be better than $3 Logboat cans, Pepe’s tacos and the bluegrass stylings of The Matchsellers? Friday, 5­­–7 p.m., Rose Music Hall, Free, 874-1944

Bockman and Mangosteen: Dual Album Release

Come jam to these two bands, along with special guest Birdwatchers, as they celebrate their album releases. Friday, 9 p.m., Rose Music Hall, $7, 874-1944

SCREEN The Circle (PG-13)

102.3 BXR

WHERE

MUSIC MATTERS

Emma Watson and Tom Hanks star in this story of a woman who lands her dream job at a tech company, only to discover a sinister agenda. R,F RUNTIME = 1:50

Colossal (R)

Down on her luck, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) moves back home from New York City. As she drinks herself to sleep every night, she wakes to discover a giant monster terrorizing Seoul, South Korea. Could this monster be connected to her breakdown?

RT RUNTIME = 1:50

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No other state saw a larger per capita increase in gun homicide rates from 2008 to 2014 than Missouri. — JOHNS HOPKINS STUDY