First, full discloser: my wife is a Rapid City member of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
Like other members of Moms I know, she is not a lunatic. She’s a former Highmore girl with paternal family roots in a Main Street car dealership and maternal DNA sunk deep in the farm-ranch ground down around Peno Lake south of town. She grew up around guns and hunters and horses and tractors and hard work.
My wife does not want to steal your guns. She respects the 2nd Amendment. She also believes —with the aching heart of a mom and a grandma — that there is too much gun violence in America and in South Dakota. And she hopes there are ways to reduce it.
To save lives. To prevent horrific injuries. To show real gun sense.
Mary has started that work at home, by forcing me to get better at how I store my firearms and ammunition around the house. Which is a good thing. A safer thing. Perhaps a life-saving thing.
She was among the red-shirted group of Moms members who went to Pierre earlier this legislative session to meet and greet lawmakers at the state Capitol and begin lobbying for what became their main initiative: Senate Concurrent Resolution 603.
If you know resolutions, you know they’re not bills that will become laws if passed. They don’t have the effect of laws. They acknowledge or honor or express the opinion or intent or will of the Legislature.
They still matter, however. And in a deeply red state with strong roots in gun rights, even a resolution intended to express concern about gun-related deaths and suggest the need for more gun safety and security — gun sense, really — had to be carefully crafted so as not to offend the NRA or the NRA supporters, who are plentiful and powerful.
So, SCR 603 was carefully crafted, then carefully re-written, then carefully presented, then carefully amended. It began as a resolution listing disturbing statistics of accidental gun deaths and, even more disturbing, firearms related suicides and calling for observance in South Dakota of National Gun Violence Awareness Day on the first Friday in June.
It didn’t call for any gun confiscation or bans. And it didn’t call for any restrictions on ammunition types or magazine capacity. It didn’t even mention the possibility of improving background checks or increasing judicial authority to remove guns from dangerous people, both of which Moms supports, in general across the nation, but wasn’t pushing for in this resolution.
It simply called for observance and awareness on a given day and a real problem: gun violence in America.
But that was too much. It was considered dead on arrival in the Legislature. So, it was softened to get rid of “violence” and observe a Gun Safety Awareness Day in South Dakota instead. Because who could have a problem with gun safety and security, including the kind of gun safety and security that might help keep firearms out of the hands of someone, maybe an adolescent, who is suffering from mental health problems and considering suicide?
But even that was a little too much. So, the resolution was further softened to simply becomes something that was “Recognizing the importance of gun safety.”
Hey, you have to start somewhere.
So that was the title of the resolution as it came out of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee — because this is really a health and human services issue — on a 7-0 vote. Six of the seven “yes” votes were Republicans, including hard-core 2nd Amendment advocates like Sen. Lance Russell of Hot Springs and Sen. Phil Jensen of Rapid City.
Even though Moms Demand Action members were disappointed that the resolution had been softened so much, they were encouraged by the committee vote and happy that they seemed to be getting somewhere with lawmakers. They’re a new group, after all, just starting to figure out an old institution in the state Capitol.
Their optimism wouldn’t last, however, when a familiar stalling mechanism kept the bill from a vote on the Senate floor for a day and another and another. During that pause, opponents of the resolution re-wrote it to become a celebration of National Rifle Association gun safety efforts that have dramatically reduced accidental firearms deaths over the last 117 years.
Why go back 117 years? Beats me. That’s just what the sponsors and the NRA did. I suppose starting just about back in the Wild West gives you plenty of time to build up some really positive stats on gun deaths.
The re-written resolution passed the full Senate 31-4, listing none of the disturbing statistics about firearms related deaths in South Dakota, how easily accessible firearms in the home increases the risk of suicides, or how they might end up being taken out of the home and even to school.
Also deleted was the fact that between 2004 to 2015 there were 798 suicides with firearms in South Dakota. And guns were the most common suicide method.
In 2017, 101 South Dakotans died from firearms, compared to 73 from drug overdoses.
According to the CDC, South Dakota has the sixth-highest rate of suicides in the nation. And in 2014, two-thirds of suicides by veterans in South Dakota were with a firearm.
Those were important facts. And Moms and its supporters tried to get them amended back into the resolution on the Senate floor, without success. Without a chance at success, as it turned out.
Dr. Shannon Hoime, a Sioux Falls pediatrician and volunteer South Dakota chapter leader for Moms Demand Action, was frustrated by the NRA-styled amendment and the way the original language was bulldozed. She said deleting the data on firearms-related deaths amounted to covering up a life-and-death reality in South Dakota.
“It’s a shame that lawmakers want to suppress information that could be used to prevent more tragedies,” Hoime said. “Our sportsmen and veterans and other gun owners deserve to hear these facts. They deserve to have lawmakers who have the courage to collaborate for life-saving solutions. Let’s work together to save lives, instead of pretending we don’t have a problem.”
The NRA amendments and deletion of vital statistics on firearms deaths were also disappointing to Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba of Sioux Falls, the main sponsor of the resolution. The numbers speak for themselves, but only if they haven’t been muzzled, Nesiba said.
“Firearm deaths in South Dakota have increased 36 percent from 2009 to 2018. In 2018 there were 91 firearm suicides and 117 total firearms deaths,” he said. “In contrast, there were 27 opioid overdoses and 58 total drug-overdose deaths. That means 4.3 times as many people died from firearm deaths in 2018 in South Dakota than died from opioid overdoses.”
Nesiba said he felt bullied by the way the opponents rewrote the resolution and continued to refuse to include the pertinent data.
“We need to figure out how to talk about this not only in our Capitol but across the state. Despite the efforts of my detractors, we have started an important conversation about firearm suicide and firearm deaths in South Dakota,” he said. “My whole point is that South Dakota has the sixth highest rate of suicide and firearms are the most frequently used means. Please be aware of this and take proper precautions. We want folks to be safe out there.”
I’d love to tell you something specific about the objections some legislators had to the original language of the resolution and why they supported the rewrite. But the three Republican senators I reached out to — Sen. Majority Leader Kris Langer of Dell Rapids, Jim Stalzer of Sioux Falls and Lance Russell — didn’t respond to my request for interviews. I also reached out to Rapid City area Republican Rep. Tim Goodwin, who is often good for a comment or two, but got no response from him, either.
While I can’t speak for any of them, I can say that the re-written resolution contains important information, too, but from a much different perspective that is energetically laudatory of the NRA. It highlights a 66-percent decrease in accidental gun deaths over the last 25 years, while gun ownership was reaching an all-time high.
It also praises the work of NRA safety programs overseen by 116,000 certified instructors who have 1 million participants a year and NRA Eddie Eagle Gun Safe programs. Those programs, offered by teachers and law-enforcement personnel, reach 31 million children from pre-school through 3rd grade with the message that if they see a gun, they should never touch it and immediately tell an adult.
That’s important stuff, too.
The original language of the resolution ended with a legislative call to encourage all citizens of the great state of South Dakota to support their communities' efforts to honor and value human lives by recognizing the importance of gun safety.
The amended resolution was shaped differently. After celebrating the NRA gun-safety programs and their impacts throughout the re-written resolution, SCR 603 as passed by the Senate ends with a similar common-sense encouragement to gun owners to “commit to observing and abiding by safe handling and storage practices, and that they avail themselves of training and practice opportunities so that safety improvements continue to be realized.”
That last part? It’s pretty good, too, and pretty hard to argue with.
Safe handling reduces the chance of gun accidents immediately and safe storage reduces the chance of gun accidents later on. It also reduces the chance that someone in a mental-health crisis will grab an available firearm and available ammunition and seek a tragic end to their anguish.
So, I like the conclusion of the rewrite. I just wish the senators who rewrote the resolution had been more collaborative with Moms and Nesiba in getting there. Republican senators could have left just some of that language on gun fatalities intact and still honored and promoted NRA safety programs. That would have also showed respect, rather than disdain, to Moms members and their hard work and good-hearted approach, not to mention the real-life losses that occur through gun violence in South Dakota.
Whether or not they intended the rewrite to be a slap in the face to Moms, many took it that way. And it’s easy to understand why.
Nonetheless, the resolution that was begun by Moms and Nesiba ended up saying, in that last sentence, at least part of what Moms wanted to say: All gun owners should abide by safe handling and storage practices and seek training and practice to improve safety and save lives.”
Moms wanted a lot more but ended up getting a little something that matters. And for a new group seeking to open dialogue on gun issues in a conservative legislature with a powerful affection for firearms, that’s really not such a bad beginning.
