Missourians Given Leave to Carry Guns

For the first time since 1875, Missouri residents will soon have the right to carry concealed guns -- thanks to a wild legislative session Thursday that featured a state senator rushing home from his Army post in Cuba just in time to cast the deciding vote.

When the law takes effect in 30 days, citizens who are at least 23 years old can apply to their county sheriff for a concealed-carry permit. To be approved, they must pass criminal background checks and take an eight-hour safety and marksmanship course.

The issue has divided Missouri for years. Rural residents across the state’s expanse of farms and forests overwhelmingly support concealed guns, but urban voters in Kansas City and St. Louis have fought against them at every turn.

Earlier this year, Gov. Bob Holden, a Democrat, vetoed the latest concealed-carry proposal. But the Republican-dominated Legislature overrode the veto this week -- the House on Wednesday and the Senate on Thursday.

Citizens of nearly every state now have the legal right to carry hidden firearms, though the permitting process is extremely restrictive in some jurisdictions, including many California counties. Missouri will join roughly 30 other states that make it relatively easy for citizens to get permits, providing they don’t have criminal histories.

For all the passion that the gun debate generates in Missouri, few politicians Thursday were talking about the pros and cons of concealed weapons. The buzz, instead, was about the last-minute appearance of state Sen. Jon Dolan, who was on active duty with the U.S. Army in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when it became clear this week that his Republican colleagues desperately needed his vote.

Though he had been in Guantanamo Bay barely two weeks, Dolan secured a six-day leave so he could fly to the state capital of Jefferson City for the vote.

Democrats angrily accused Republicans of pulling strings to get Dolan home so quickly after such a brief deployment.

“It’s an absolute abomination,” said Mike Kelley, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party.

Shouting so fiercely into his cellphone that he nearly lost his voice, Kelley said: “Close to a quarter of a million men and women are over in [Iraq] fighting for our country. Some of them lost their parents while they were deployed. Some of their wives had babies. Now we find out, all they had to do was ask and they could have gone home? That’s all Jon Dolan said he did: just ask. Please. Don’t insult us. Political rank was pulled.”

Dolan insisted it was not. A commander in the Missouri National Guard, he was called to active duty for up to one year as a public affairs officer for the Army. He said he went through normal military channels to get his leave approved. “No exceptions. No political considerations. No special treatment,” Dolan said.

In fact, Missouri’s senior Republican senator in Washington was asked by state party leaders to help get Dolan out of Cuba. Sen. Christopher S. Bond’s spokesman, Ernie Blazar, said his boss quickly concluded that he had better stay out of it and declined to help.

“Not at all,” Blazar said. “Nope. No fingerprints.”

Army officials said Dolan’s request was unusual in that he had not been deployed long enough to accrue leave time. (Active-duty soldiers generally earn 2 1/2 days of leave for every month they serve.) So he asked his superiors for permission to take “advance leave.” They concluded they could carry out their mission -- producing a military newspaper and answering media calls -- without him for a few days, so Lt. Col. Pamela Hart approved the request.

Taking advance leave after just a few weeks on the ground “is unusual, but it can happen,” Hart said in an interview from Cuba. “It was not at all political. To us, he’s a major in the U.S. Army,” not a state senator.

Dolan spent $7,500, a quarter of his annual legislative salary, to make it to Jefferson City on time, though he hopes the Republican Party’s political action committee can reimburse him. Besides the gun vote, he joined a narrow Republican majority in overriding the governor’s veto of an abortion bill. Women in Missouri will now be required to consult with a doctor and then wait 24 hours before having an abortion.

The votes over, Dolan said he planned to enjoy the next few days of unexpected rest with his two young children before returning to Cuba.

“It’s very satisfying to promote and protect democracy and get to see my family all in one week,” he said.