To fully understand the genesis of the Missouri Republican over the sharing of a list of concealed-carry gun holders, you have to go back to the beginning.
Well, almost.
To about 95 A.D., when either John the apostle or some other first-century John wrote the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, the one that predicts the second coming of Christ in apocalyptic metaphors of good and evil. In Revelation, John writes of the antichrist marking the godless before Christ comes to bring his followers to heaven.
Almost 2,000 years later, Missouri Republicans began comparing a federal attempt to improve driver’s license security as a way to reduce terrorism to that very
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Seriously.
In 2009, as Missouri was debating whether to make it illegal for the state to conform its driver’s licenses to the federal Real ID requirements (a bill pushed by congressional Republicans), Rep. Jim Guest, R-King City, convinced his fellow lawmakers that the Real ID bill symbolized “something religiously evil.â€
“Some people are genuinely worried about it,†said Guest, who also theorized, completely seriously, that the federal government was on citizens using secretly implanted microchips.
Mr. Guest sponsored the bill that became the law that in 2013 Missouri Republicans are using to foment fear about guns, privacy and law enforcement.
It would be funny if it weren’t so damned dangerous.
Over the past few weeks, some of the leading Republicans in Missouri — led by House Speaker Tim Jones of Eureka and Sen. Kurt Schaefer of Columbia — have tried to over the fact that the state Department of Revenue is doing three things: digitally scanning the documents a Missourian needs to get a driver’s license, such as a birth certificate or Social Security card; sharing the state’s list of concealed-carry permit holders with the federal government; and trying to comply with the federal Real ID law that, apparently, is the devil.
Jones and Schaefer have held a series of fire-and-brimstone news conferences, calling Gov. Jay Nixon and state and federal law enforcement officials liars and cheats. Mostly, they’ve pandered to the fears of gun-toting Republicans in Missouri who are afraid that President Barack Obama is coming for their guns. They’ve stoked those fears, suggesting wrongly that the Missouri Highway Patrol has broken the law by sharing their names with the federal government.
One problem: It’s all a lie.
Yes, Missouri lawmakers made it illegal in 2009 to fully comply with the Real ID law. And the federal government plainly says Missouri hasn’t fully complied, but it’s close enough that the feds haven’t imposed penalties. Which is a good thing.
If Missouri isn’t at least in a wink-and-a-nod compliance with the security measures, the state’s residents won’t be allowed on commercial airlines. The state’s economy would crash overnight. Is that what Schaefer and Jones want?
And yes, the state patrol shared the CCW list with the feds. But guess what? The law actually requires it. It matters little that the Legislature made Missouri one of the states to close its . By making the conceal-carry endorsement part of the driver’s license records, lawmakers made it subject to the state and federal , which plainly require law enforcement to have access to the records.
Schaefer and Jones are both lawyers, which means one of two things.
They’re really bad lawyers, or they know they’re lying for cynical political gain, and that just makes them horrible people.
Because here’s what happens when you stir fear among gun-toting Americans against the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), against the state patrol, against the very first responders who have been the last few days trying to figure out who is responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing:
You make it harder for them to do their jobs because two men unqualified for the job think the road to the Missouri attorney general’s office is paved with lies about mind control and microchips.
In 2009, around the same time Republicans were pushing the mind-control fantasy, they were also attacking the , one of the many national “fusion centers†established after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Reason: One of the fusion center reports profiling the habits of both domestic and foreign terrorists dared to mention certain identifying characteristics that also mimic some elements of what were, at the time, fringe Republicans.
That center’s only job is to keep Americans alive. It does so by fostering the sort of cooperation among local, state and federal law enforcement officials that was much less common before 19 terrorists with American driver’s licenses hijacked four airplanes and killed 2,977 people.
That 2009 report wasn’t just accurate, . About a month after Republicans held hearings on it, three different extremists who mirrored the identifying characteristics in the report went on killing sprees.
Four years later, the “Don’t Tread on Me†crowd has taken over the Missouri Republican Party. They aren’t on the fringes anymore.