JPs amend proposal on guns in buildings
Faulkner County courts off limits
CONWAY — Faulkner County employees and elected leaders with concealed-weapons permits could carry their guns onto most county property but not into buildings where district or circuit court is held under a revised proposal before the Quorum Court.
The plan, advanced by Justice of the Peace Randy Higgins and amended on a 12-1 vote Tuesday night, will have a third and final reading before the 13-member Quorum Court on Nov. 17.
The measure already would have exempted the sheriff ’s office and detention facilities, or jails, from the county offices where employees and elected leaders could carry guns.
“After talking with some of the circuit judges and Sheriff [Matt] Rice … we decided to go ahead and put the justice building in as one of the places that would be exempt,” Higgins said Wednesday. District judges Susan Weaver and David Reynolds also wanted “to get on board as well to have their courts exempt.”
The Faulkner County Criminal Justice Center, which houses circuit courtrooms, the prosecutor’s office and a few other offices; and the separate district court building have metal detectors and one or more bailiffs present during court sessions.
Rice said Wednesday that he didn’t see “any need” for people to carry guns into the sheriff’s office and court buildings.
Higgins said justices of the peace “don’t want county property to be considered a weapon-free zone.”
“It seems to me that these crazy people who perpetrate the heinous acts [that] they seem to go where they don’t think people will be able to protect themselves,” Higgins said.
“You see them at churches and at schools and at movie theaters where the people are really not prepared to protect themselves,” he added. “We don’t want it to be an armed fortress” but want employees to be able to defend themselves.
Higgins said he had not heard of any dissension on
the proposal among the justices of the peace, though he said one justice of the peace, Dan Thessing, voted present Tuesday night.
Thessing, contacted Wednesday, said, “I’m a very strong proponent of the Second Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution. “I just don’t think the members of the Quorum Court or employees should be given any kind of special status. We are just citizens who are serving at the will of the people. … The average citizens don’t get to enjoy this [privilege].
“I’m trying not to afford a special privilege either to the employee or the elected official,” Thessing said. “I don’t think we have the authority to tinker with the Second Amendment.”
Thessing said he expects to be in the minority on this proposal.
“It looks like a train running down the track, and I’m
the caboose,” he said. “I just want to make sure that everyone gets treated fairly.”
Higgins said the sheriff has agreed to offer training annually to all county employees, whether they have a gun permit or not, on how to protect themselves should there be an active shooting situation. Higgins said he does not advocate that employees start pursuing any such shooters but that the workers know “how to secure themselves” during an attack.
Earlier this year, the Arkansas General Assembly approved Act 1259, which allows countywide elected officials and county employees with concealed-weapon permits to carry concealed handguns in county buildings, with the approval of their quorum courts.
Such buildings may include “the courthouse, the courthouse annex or other building owned, leased, or regularly used by the county for conducting court proceedings or housing a county office,” says the act, sponsored in part by state Sen. Linda Collins-Smith, R-Pocahontas.