The Aldermen of the City of St. Louis didn’t think this one through. The city, one of the most violent in the nation, wanted to make their parks gun-free zones, but Missouri’s state preemption law effectively blocked it.
So the city dreamed up a cute work-around.
Guns now banned from St. Louis city parks
Missouri state law allows adults to carry guns in the open, so the new law reclassifies the parks and recreation facilities as child-care facilities, where guns are not allowed.
Maybe they were inspired by the St. Louis Zoo which designated itself an amusement park in order to ban gun there.
Congratulations, St. Louis. Running a collection of new “child care facilities” around the city comes with its own requirements. You now have to comply with a slew of state laws.
19CSR 30-63.010 requires you to put all of your park employees through comprehensive background checks.
Even if you call them “license-exempt” facilities, 19CSR 30-60.010 requires, inspections, equipment, certain personnel, numbers of personnel per child…the City will also need to hire registered nurses for the parks.
St. Louis is going to love the new park admissions procedures and all the reporting, too. Did they remember to file a Program Evaluation Questionnaire before they designated the parks as child care facilities.
I hope they’ve installed access controls for those parks as required by 19CSR 30-61.010. That’s probably going to require them to completely fencing in all the parks and set up entry control gates. I suppose they can hire more police officers for the other safety and security requirements.
At least now they’ll finally have to fix and open all the public restrooms. And install the child-specific equipment.
I could keep paging through Missouri state laws for more regulations. And I expect the city itself has a few child care laws of their own they forgot to check before making this move. But I hope I’ve made my point of what a bad idea this was, even without getting into Second Amendment and state constitution Art. I, Sec. 23 issues.
I lived in St. Louis several years ago. I’m sorry to see the average intelligence of the government has not improved.