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We Speak Hendren (Editorial)

2 min read

A few years back, former state Rep. Jeremy Hutchinson offered to explain a piece of legislation to his uncle, Kim Hendren, who was then a state senator.

“I speak Hendren,” he said.

This week, we speak Hendren too.

Last week, Kim Hendren, now a state representative from Gravette, was discussing House Bill 1077, which would require public universities and colleges in Arkansas to allow faculty and staff having concealed carry licenses to bring firearms on campus. The law currently gives institutions of higher learning the choice of whether to permit guns on campus, and all of them have decided against it.

“On the way down here today, I got two or three calls from the colleges and universities in my neck of the woods … and without exception, they said leave the law as it is,” Hendren was quoted as saying last week.

The Arkansas House approved HB1077 anyway. The state Senate’s Judiciary Committee was scheduled to consider the measure on Wednesday, a day that found Arkansas Business trying to put out the paper early in the face of a forecasted winter storm. So maybe those panelists did the sensible thing and declined to advance the bill to the full Senate.

We thought we had a rejoinder to this bill: If guns are good on campuses, surely they’re good at the state Capitol. We thought no lawmakers could think they’d be good there.

We were wrong.

Rep. Dan Sullivan is proposing a bill to expand where people with concealed carry licenses can bring their guns, allowing them at bars, liquor stores, churches, schools, polling locations, meetings of local governmental entities and, yes, the state Capitol.

We haven’t heard bar and liquor store owners and other business people clamoring for these changes, and it’s too soon to know whether they’ll be opposing them. We’re left with this: Silence implies consent.

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